


The Unbeddable Hulk

by catherineflowers



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Feels, F/M, Mentions of Lannicest, Mentions of Underage, Minor Violence, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-09-14 04:28:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16906116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catherineflowers/pseuds/catherineflowers
Summary: In a bad place after a bad break-up, Jaime Lannister decides that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else.





	1. The Sun's Getting Real Low

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CaptainTarthister](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainTarthister/gifts).



> This was a birthday present for the fab CaptainTarthister and she decided she wanted to share it! Yay!
> 
> She gave me the prompt of "Jaime gets something in a sex manual very very wrong"! This was the result ...

He sees her in a club. A dirty club, in a basement, noisy and with terrible sound.

Jaime doesn’t care. He’s off his face – drunk enough that he can barely keep his feet, and he took a fistful of pills someone passed him outside. He has no idea what they were.

She’s butt-ugly and absolutely massive, scowling in a corner while her friends have a good time without her.

Maybe not her friends – she’s with a couple of teenage girls who are clearly too young to be in a shithole like this – if she’s their mother then she’s doing a shit job looking after them. The younger, the brunette, is at the bar not far from where Jaime is slumped. He grins at the girl – she looks like she wants to be sick.

“Is that a woman?” he slurs, stabbing a finger at the giant in the corner.

“Fuck off, Grandad,” says the girl.

Never mind. The Hulk looks like easy meat, and that’s what Jaime wants tonight. It’s what Dr Bronn told him he wants, so fuck it, he’s going to have her.

He stumbles into the restroom, almost slipping in a puddle of piss – in here the light is bright enough that he can consult the book Dr Bronn gave him.

Dr Bronn’s Sex Manual, it’s called. He’s read it a couple of times, and it seems stupid to Jaime, crude and offensive to women, but what does he know? Dr Bronn is a world-renowned and very expensive sex therapist, recommended by Tyrion and with a very long waiting list. Jaime is a fucking idiot who spent his whole life banging his poisonous, manipulative, serially-unfaithful sister.

Thinking of Cersei makes him want to punch things. It makes him want to drink til he’s numb, pass out in his vomit, drive 100-leagues-an-hour through the city in his stupor and kill every man, woman and child he sees.

Perhaps not the healthiest break-up reaction, Dr Bronn has been telling him. Dr Bronn isn’t about the self-medication. He is of the mind that the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else. Hence the book.

But Jaime has never _been_ under anyone else. He’s not going to be impressing any Myrish centrefolds with his pleasuring techniques or his superhuman stamina. No Kings Landing debutantes are going to want him either, not at forty-five years old with three kids by his sister.

Dr Bronn says Jaime is going to have to lower his sights considerably. Make a play for someone who can’t afford to be picky. He steels himself and heads back out into the club.

He cruises through the crowds until he’s standing next to her. The Hulk. She’s got a sour face on and is holding a drink that doesn’t look alcoholic in the slightest. She looks him up and down with a look of contempt.

“You into men?” he asks. Immediately regrets it.

“What?!” she spits. Quite rightly.

His fool mouth is too drunk to stop, though. “Women? Horses?”

She walks away.

“What’s your name?” he calls after her.

She ignores him.

“I’m Jaime Lannister, son of Tywin – big bad billionaire, you may have heard of him?”

She doesn’t respond. He pokes her again.

“Those girls you’re with are underage. Too young to be in here, and certainly too young to be drinking. I’m guessing you’re their … chauffeur? Bodyguard maybe? You’re not personable enough to be a Nanny. Either way, you’d lose your job if I called the cops right now, am I right?”

She scowls at him. He’s hit a nerve, he can tell. This jaunt out to the seedy part of town was not her idea.

“So what’s your name?”

“Brienne Tarth,” she growls between clenched teeth.

“And the girls?”

She grabs him by the front of his shirt. Shoves him at the wall. “Go near them and I’ll be the one calling the police,” she spits in his face.

He holds his hands up. “I’m not interested in the girls.”

She lets him go. Rolls her eyes and goes back to ignoring him.

He nods over to them, dancing their hearts out in the middle of the crowd. “They look fine,” he says. “They won’t miss you for a few minutes. Why don’t you let your hair down too?”

“Let my hair down? Are you trying to sell me drugs?”

He thinks of the gram of powdered poppymilk he has in his back pocket. “Would it help?”

“No!”

“I’m not trying to sell you drugs. But there’s an alley out the back, or there’s the restroom, such as it is. Some of the booths look pretty private, too.”

“Private for what?” She looks at him like he’s completely mad.

“Sex.”

“With _you_?”

He shrugs. “Don’t tell me you don’t find the idea appealing. Ravished by a handsome stranger in an alley – I’d bet you never dreamed this would happen tonight.”

Dr Bronn’s sex manual assured him that this would be a winning scenario – that it was every woman’s secret fantasy. They could sneak off, he could close his eyes, bang her quick, and tell Dr Bronn he’d done his homework for the week. Then he could go back to slowly killing himself over Cersei.

“No thanks,” the Hulk sneers.

“Why not?”

“You’ve got vomit on you.”

He looks down – she’s right. He doesn’t remember throwing up, but there were a few minutes after he’d taken those pills that were a total blur.

“I could wash?” he offers.

“You could fuck off,” she suggests instead.

He doesn’t understand it. Yeah he’s a little worse for wear, a little rough round the edges, but look at her! She’s huge and ugly and has a face like a wet weekend. This should have been a sure thing.

He backs away, suddenly more miserable even than he was when he left Cersei. Maybe he should call Cersei. Maybe all those guys she’d fucked weren’t such a big deal. Their cousin. Their bodyguard. Even the pool boy for all he knew.

His head is spinning, so fresh air seems like a good idea. He staggers out of the club and into the freezing night. The cold smacks him in the face like a brick wall, making his head swim worse than before.

There’s a couple of lairy guys outside, arguing with the bouncer, looking for a fight. The bouncer is having none of it.

Jaime leans against the wall, vaguely watching the scene play out while he tries to control the urge to vomit.

“Oi!” one of them yells. “What you looking at, Pretty Man?”

He’s a young guy, no more than a boy really, with curly brown hair and a heavy brow. He comes over to Jaime, bored with the bouncer, gets right in his face.

“What do you think you’re looking at?” he asks.

Jaime feels like shit now, he can’t even think of a witty retort. The sweat is pouring off him despite the cold.

He holds up a hand, opens his mouth to warn the boy, and then vomits on him. A huge torrent of white puke that hits the boy square in the nuts. Splatters all down his trousers.

“What the fuck?!” yells the boy. “Did you just fucking puke on me?”

“Maybe,” Jaime manages.

“I’ll give you fucking maybe! Hit him, Theon!”

His mate, a scruffy, ugly boy of around the same age, smacks Jaime in the mouth. Then in the guts. Jaime goes down like a sack of shit – it doesn’t take much. He feels his cheek hit the pavement, right in a puddle. He groans.

“Look at my kecks!” the boy was shouting. “My mum’s gonna kill me!”

“You look like you’ve pissed yourself, Robb!”

“Fuck off!”

“Here,” says Theon, the boy that had hit Jaime. “These are designer, mate!”

Jaime feels a tug on the waistband of his jeans, right where the label is.

“They’re Renly Baratheon,” Theon reads. “This is a hundred dragon pair of jeans.”

“Reckon this bloke owes me some, don’t you?”

“Reckon he does.”

Before Jaime can muster the oxygen to protest, the two of them have ripped his boots off and are tugging his trousers down his legs.

He’s in no condition to prevent them – he can’t even lift his head out of the muddy puddle right now. He can only lie there, arms stretched out in front of him and groan feebly as they strip him.

The cold night air hits his bare legs, and the two boys laugh as they throw his trousers back and forth between them.

One of them gives Jaime another kick to the guts, which makes him throw up again. Some of it gets on Theon’s shoe.

“You don’t learn, do you,” Theon hisses.

He brings his shoe down, hard, on the back of Jaime’s outstretched hand. The pain is indescribable – a crunch of bones and a splinter of white hot agony that races up his arm and out of his throat as a horrible scream.

“Hey!” someone shouts. In his agony, Jaime sees a looming figure running towards them, someone big and powerful, and at first he thinks it’s the bouncer. The two boys run away, his jeans trailing along with them.

The figure crouches down beside him, where he is rolling on his back, clutching his mangled hand. _It’s her_ , he thinks, from far away. _The Hulk_. She has the two girls with her, her two charges, shivering in their little strappy outfits.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

He can only cry in pain.

“Somebody call an ambulance!” she calls over her shoulder. The redhead girl fumbles for her phone.

Jaime doesn’t remember much after that. He remembers being in the Hulk’s arms, being carried somewhere. He remembers being sick again, all over himself this time, and he remembers her gently wiping it from his beard as she got her two companions safely into a cab.

Then he remembers the back of the ambulance, the bright lights and the unfamiliar faces looming over him. The Hulk’s, too.

 _Brienne_ , he remembers. Her name is Brienne.

He remembers someone saying his temperature was high, too high, asking Brienne what he had taken. He remembers her explaining that she didn’t know, she wasn’t with him, that she was only a bystander.

He remembers having his stomach pumped, a fat tube shoved into his nose and down his throat, a horrible, panicky, retching, gagging experience during which he clung to Brienne for dear life. He remembers the strength of her, the calmness, too. Telling him to breathe, not to fight it. Telling him he’d be okay.

He believed her. She felt like the only kind thing in the world and he wanted to sob in her arms when they pulled the tube out and it was over, finally over.

She’s still there too when they set and plaster his hand, though by this time it’s early morning and the sun is coming up. She looks much uglier in daylight, but she’s warm, and big, and comforting in all the ways that Cersei could never be, and since he just feels broken and wretched, that’s all he wants right now.

They give him something for the pain and he falls asleep pressed against Brienne’s side, head lolling on her shoulder while they wait for a cab home.

When he wakes, he isn’t in hospital any more.

He’s in an apartment, a small studio with a soft bed and a big leather couch. He’s naked apart from his boxers, but he’s been covered up to the neck with a big blue comforter, and his broken hand is supported by pillows.

Brienne is asleep on the other side of the room, in a rocking chair that looks entirely too small for her giant body. She’s dead to the world, head thrown back and mouth agape, snoring loudly. She’s dressed in her pyjamas – a ratty t-shirt and jersey shorts so short they barely cover her decently.

Her legs are unbelievably long. He’d thought her masculine when she was in the club, dressed in that man’s shirt and jeans, but uncovered, her legs are actually slender and shapely. She’s a bit hairy, but he won’t hold that against her – it’s been a long, cold winter. He has a sudden image of being on top of her with those legs wrapped around him and has to admit it’s not an unpleasant thought.

Suddenly, she snuffles herself awake, leaping upright in her chair and rubbing the drool off her cheek.

“Hi,” he says.

She blinks, clearly not awake enough to answer.

“Is this your place?” he asks.

She nods. “They wanted to discharge you and I – I didn’t know where you lived.”

“Oh. Would have been an expensive taxi ride. I live in the Westerlands.”

“What are you doing all the way up North?”

He shrugs. “Just checking out the nightlife.”

“Well I’d say you got a taste of it.” She uncurls from the rocking chair and pads over to the tiny kitchen. “Want some coffee?”

He nods. “Please. Where are my clothes?”

“You threw up on your shirt,” she says. Wrinkles her brow. “And I think you got mugged for your jeans.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Your jacket’s on the couch. And your phone. Along with your … book.”

He gets up and walks, weakly, to the couch. There, on top of his neatly-folded jacket, is the bright, garish colours of Dr Bronn’s Sex Manual. He picks it and his phone up and sheepishly gets back into bed. Brienne watches him the whole way.

“Is that why you tried to pick me up?” she asks. “That book?”

It’s a loaded question. If she’s read the manual, even just the back cover, she knows what he was looking for – someone ugly. Someone likely to be desperate. Dr Bronn calls it “pigging”.

“Not the first time you’ve come up against Dr Bronn?” he asks with a smirk.

She doesn’t answer so he needles her more.

“What did you expect? Standing there scowling in a corner at six-foot-three and dressed like a man – you’re making yourself a target, you know.”

“A _target_?”

“Dr Bronn is all the rage. He speaks to lots of men. I can imagine you’ve had a fair few try to get inside Big Brienne.”

She grimaces. “One or two.”

“There you go, then. The book’s not the problem. It’s you – you look like The Hulk. The Unbeddable Hulk!”

“The _what_?”

He sees her hackles rise, colour springing into her cheeks and her nostrils flaring with rage.

“It’s not a very good example to those girls, its it?” he pokes. “Not very _professional_.”

She slams the coffee cups down. Marches to her front door and swings it open. Outside is a dingy corridor that smells of other people’s cooking. The strip light flickers.

“Leave,” she says.

He stares at her. Surprised. He’d expected her to push back, to fight him, duel with words the way he and Cersei always had. To fling an insult back – not actually be hurt by what he’d said. He hadn’t meant it.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

She just stares at him, the door open.

“You saved me last night. Stayed with me when everyone else would have left me in the gutter.”

“Don’t take the piss out of me.”

“I’m trying to say sorry. I’m a bitter man. Angry, and I’m in pain. It was a shitty thing to say. Forgive me.”

She closes the door. Goes back to the coffee.

“You had a bad breakup?” she asks eventually. Grumpy and wary.

“The worst,” he admits.

“There’s _terrible_ advice in that book, you know,” she says quietly. “I don’t know who wrote it, but they’re an idiot.”

Jaime shrugs. “He’s a very expensive idiot. You should see the size of his castle.”

She laughs, a small snort.

“I’ve never tried to pick anyone up in a club before. I’m not very good, am I.”

“Not really.” She passes him his coffee. It’s black and well-sugared, just how he likes it, though she didn’t ask.

“I’m sorry. I was … hurting and miserable and just … wasted. Picking you up like that … it was just crass, that’s not who I am. The book told me it would end my pain and I … I’m desperate.”

She sits on the couch, bent over her own legs, elbows on her knees. She looks at her toes. “Are you attracted to me?” she asks.

Jaime takes a breath. It’s a hard question to answer – he doesn’t know what attraction is, not really. He’s so used to having been one half of a whole – being with Cersei was the purpose of his life. He’s never contemplated what it might be like to desire someone other than his twin.

He’s always found the idea repugnant. But now he wonders if attraction is spotting someone across the room in a club. If its being saved by them, being held by them, clinging to them when you are sick and hurting. Feeling them on your skin hours after they have let you go.

 “Yes,” he says. Looking at her legs. Her brilliant blue eyes, kissed by the winter sunshine streaming through her kitchen window. “I suppose I am.”

He knows he wants her to take away his pain, make him feel whole, a whole man by himself and not just half of someone who doesn’t want him any more. He thinks she could do that – he’s felt her strength.

“How about you?” he asks softly. “I’m quite aware that you saw the contents of my stomach about four times last night.”

She shrugs, which stings a bit.

“It’s been a long time since I had sex,” she says. “A really long time.”

“Got anywhere to go today?”

She locks eyes with him. Licks her thick lips. Shakes her head.

“Me neither,” he whispers. Sits up to lean towards the couch. “Want to remedy that, then?”

“Take a shower first,” she tells him. “I need to get condoms – mine have probably expired.”

He grins. Raises an eyebrow. “Buy a _big_ box.”

She drops her eyes to his boxers with a disdainful curl of her lip. “You’re not _that_ big.”

“ _Lots_ ,” he laughs. “I mean buy lots.”

After she dresses and leaves, he heads into her dingy little bathroom and uses her sputtering, rusty shower to rid himself of the filth and blood and vomit. He’s covered in bruises and his throat is so sore from the fat, horrible tube they had down his throat to pump his stomach of those pills, but he feels better, clearer, than he has in such a long time.

He’s going to get laid. The thought excites him and terrifies him in equal measure. It’s just a pity-fuck – on both their parts, he knows that. A curiosity fuck too, but that doesn’t make him any less apprehensive.

He wraps his plastered hand in her shower cap, and soaps himself all over with her cheap bar of soap. Washes his hair and beard before climbing out, carefully wrapping himself in a thin scratchy towel that Cersei wouldn’t have let her servants clean her car with.

He finds a new toothbrush in Brienne’s bathroom cabinet and cleans his teeth too.

He wanders back out into the living area in just a towel and she’s there, just got home. The sight of him half naked makes her jaw drop and she fumbles with the bag she’s holding. Colour blooms in her cheeks.

It takes him a moment, but then he gets it. Last night he was wasted, covered in puke and had been drinking for days. She hadn’t exactly met him at his best. But cleaned up, shirt off to show his gym-toned body and his Summer-Isles-tan, his hair wet and flopping into his eyes – well, now she can see for herself, can’t she.

He gives her a wicked grin, pleased to see her blush darken further and her pupils widen. Maybe Dr Bronn had the right of it after all. She looks like she’s about to start drooling.

She rummages in her bag and fishes out the box of condoms. Passes them to him without a word.

He smiles. She smiles back, suddenly looking nervous, too. He beckons her to follow him. He doesn’t think she can wait any longer. He doesn’t want to wait himself, he’s worried he might lose his nerve.

He drops his towel as he walks towards the bed, letting her get an eyeful of his backside. She follows him silently, eyes wide. He’s amused to see that she is still fully dressed – hat and boots and a thick parka.

He undoes the parka and eases it off her shoulders as seductively as he can. Pushes her back on the bed and pulls her boots off, looking up at her from between her parted knees. He yanks her jeans off, and her fluffy socks too, then lifts her hips to get her panties down.

Before he’s had time to form a rational thought, he’s got his face in her cunt. She gasps – belatedly he realises he’s tonguing her clit before he’s even kissed her. He’s pretty sure Dr Bronn wouldn’t recommend that.

It takes him an embarrassingly long time to get her off. With Cersei, he could do it in two, maybe three minutes tops. But without his right hand, without knowing Brienne’s body the way he knows his sister’s, without knowing what she likes, it’s not an easy task. It’s a good thirty minutes of build-up, of experimenting and teasing, persistence and patience.

But he loves every second. She tastes and smells so good! She’s cradling his head in both her hands and he’s got his head half stuck under her sweater and his nose buried in her thick hair and he must be doing it right, he must be, because Brienne is moaning and arching up to his face and he can taste how wet she is and all he wants is to keep going and keep going, to make her come. He _has_ to make her come.

She’s whimpering little encouragements now, her thighs trembling by his ears, toes planted on his shoulders. Begging him not to stop.

Finally she gives a great noisy wail and clutches him against her, smothering him with her big legs as she comes. Jaime almost punches the air – getting Brienne off is truly the greatest feeling of victory he’s had in a long time. Liberating.

He lifts his head to grin at her and she’s looking at him with elation. Her face is flushed red, her hair a mess, and he has to laugh at the fact she’s still wearing her bright blue bobble hat.

He climbs up her body to pull it off, and her sweater and bra too. She’s warm and pleasantly pink underneath and Jaime treats himself to her nipples, which are perky and cute sitting on top of her almost completely flat chest.

She lifts him to her mouth to kiss him at last, and gods, she’s passionate. He thought she’d be clunky and unpracticed – a woman as ugly as her probably didn’t get laid much. But she’s matching him kiss for kiss, stroke for stroke, they are moving together almost effortlessly, and it feels so right, so good.

Suddenly, she has one hand on his cock and one on his balls. Her hands are big and strong and they drive him wild – he thrusts into her fist like a man possessed. He rolls onto his back beneath her, dizzy with pleasure, listening to his own groans and accepting her warm kisses.

“Fuck me,” he moans. “Oh please, Brienne, please …”

Dr Bronn would despair – he’s begging her, he’s lost all semblance of control now and this is not a quick bang to get Cersei out of his system. He’s gazing into Brienne’s big blue eyes, he’s caressing her face, he’s kissing her soft, full lips like she’s the most perfect treasure he’s ever been allowed to behold. What is happening here?

She reaches out a long arm, scrambling in the box for a condom and smiling against his lips. He’s smiling too, like a lovestruck idiot in fact, breathing her breath and nuzzling her broken nose with his.

They put the condom on together and she swings one of those big long white legs over him and takes his cock inside her, slowly, achingly slow. Jaime has to fight an urge to tell her that he loves her.

Madness. Sheer madness. But hasn’t that always been the story of his love life?

She pins him to the bed now with her hands on his wrists, and the strength of her turns him on so much he thinks he will blow his load right then and there. This is so different to Cersei, but so the same as well. That feeling of being dominated, of not really being in control. It’s even more intense when it’s physical.

Fuck, he needs to stop thinking about Cersei.

He arches back into the pillows and cries out shamelessly, pleading with Brienne to ride him – _use him_ – until he comes.

He feels it already in the base of his spine, a burning hot well of pleasure that’s spreading through his belly and his chest and his legs and his cock … oh his cock … his cock’s on fire! It’s magic, electric, bloody thunder, ice and fire.

His orgasm hits him like a Brienne-shaped juggernaut, so good and so strong. Just like her.

He’s never been noisy when he comes but he just can’t help himself. He lets out a roar of animalistic release that is so loud it makes Brienne’s upstairs neighbour pound on the floor and yell at them to shut up.

Jaime doesn’t care and Brienne just laughs. He collapses onto the pillows, every nerve in his body singing a sweet, sweet song of residual pleasure. He pulls Brienne down on top of him to kiss her. And thank her. And kiss her again. His cock still throbs weakly inside her.

She shifts herself off him and gently pulls the condom off his softening cock. She drops it to the floor and he notices with amusement that it lands with a wet splat on Dr Bronn’s Sex Manual.

Well, so much for that. Dr Bronn had seemingly forgotten to write the chapter in which the pig-ugly woman you were supposed to use to get your head back into the sex game was actually amazing. Where just meeting her rocked your world and you had literally the best sex of your life with her.

Brienne gets up and pulls her sweater back on, followed by her fluffy socks. Pads off to the bathroom with a shy smile.

Jaime sits up with a groan. He may have overestimated his ability to fuck her all day – he feels very much like an old man who needs a nap right now and his cock is in a state of shock. His balls ache too – he doesn’t think they’ve ever blown their load that hard. He’s dozing a doze of a satisfied man by the time she gets out of the bathroom.

She hovers awkwardly in the kitchen, seemingly unsure about how to be with him now. She doesn’t seem able to look him in the eye.

Instead, she busies herself washing up the coffee mugs, wiping down surfaces, giving him glimpses of her surprisingly shapely rear as she leans up and the sweater pulls up a bit.

“Do you want something to eat?” she asks at last.

He lets his eyes drop lasciviously to the thick blonde hair at the juncture of her thighs. Grins wickedly at her.

He expects her to roll her eyes, to tell him off and tell him she meant _actual_ food, but she calls his bluff. Before another word can pass his lips she’s astride his face and he’s sucking her clit again like a starving man. Damn, she’s voracious too.

It’s much quicker with her on top – she thrusts against his face and joins in with both her hands, rubbing herself, pinching her own nipples under her sweater, watching intently as he swirls her with his tongue.

She’s so ugly when she comes, her face scrunched up and her teeth bared, but Jaime just melts at the sight of her.  They end up cuddling on her bed, his arms wrapped possessively around her waist and his head on her belly.

“Can I be your boyfriend?” he asks suddenly, surprising even himself. Well, Dr Bronn always did recommend the direct approach.

“My what?”

“Your boyfriend. You know … we do this all the time. With each other.”

Her eyes are wide. “I don’t think we know each other all that well.”

“Does that matter?”

She gives him a look that is almost sad. “I think it does. You … you’re a lovely guy, Jaime, but you’re clearly not in a good place.”

“I feel good now. With you.”

“I’m not some sort of knight in shining armour.”

“You could be.”

She laughs. “You have a serious drug problem. You could have died last night.”

“Last night I wanted to. But today …”

“I don’t know if I want all that drama in my life.”

“It was a bad night. I’m not a dramatic guy, I promise.”

“I don’t know if I can believe that.”

Jaime drops his eyes, thinking of Cersei. Thinking of the three children he fathered with his sister. Brienne has a point – that’s never going to be an easy conversation with a new girlfriend. Is it fair to Brienne to start a relationship before he’s explained all that?

“What if it doesn’t work out?” she asks. “If we like different TV shows, or you find out how much I snore …”

He nods over at the rocking chair where she had been asleep when he first woke up here. “I already know how much you snore.”

But she’s not looking so lighthearted. “Don’t leap in with both feet,” she says. “I can’t take her place, Jaime. You clearly love her.”

“Who?!”

“Your wife. Your family.”

“My what?”

“They gave your phone to me at the hospital, you have two boys and a girl on your lock screen. Your kids, yes?”

“Yes, but … no!”

“Which is it?”

Jaime falls silent. He can’t have this conversation. He can’t. “She cheated on me,” he says after a long, long moment. “Repeatedly. Throughout.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I never cheated on her. I’ve never been with anyone else. Well … until you.”

She looks a little taken aback. “Oh.”

“I found out a year ago – my brother told me, and I wished he hadn’t. I tried so hard to get past it, but I … I couldn’t. I left and I haven’t been back since.”

“Not even to see your kids?”

“They don’t know I’m their father.”

Brienne looks confused.

“It wasn’t the most conventional of relationships,” he explains. Hoping that covers a multitude of sins.

Fortunately, she doesn’t press him further. Instead, she brings his head back to her belly and holds him close – that same comforting embrace that he never wants to leave.

“Is that a no?” he asks. “To the boyfriend thing?”

“Why don’t we just … see how it goes?” she says softly, stroking his hair. “Stay with me now. Come back tomorrow … we’ll go on a date? Eat together and talk together and … just see how it goes.”

He places a soft kiss on her belly button. “Thank you,” he says.

“Don’t thank me,” she says. “We’re just seeing.”

For now, that’s enough.


	2. Smash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaime and Brienne are in that sex phase ...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is CaptainTarthister's Christmas present and it's ALL about the smut baby!
> 
> Apologies that I have changed the length of this - thought I was going to get the story told in a couple of chapters. Turns out it's going to take at least four! Also apologies to everyone who commented to me lately, Christmas season has been crazy and I haven't had a chance to go through and reply. I'll do it asap, just want you to know that all your comments are appreciated.

Brienne wakes to the feel of Jaime’s hand. It’s in her panties – stroking her clit. She wakes to the sound of her own harsh breathing, to the feel of her own teeth on her lip.

She’d been dreaming. Woke up to find it wasn’t a dream at all.

It’s Sunday morning. Jaime got into Winterfell on the red-eye Friday night and they’ve pretty much been in bed together ever since. Brief breaks for food and showers and sleep, but oh, they can’t get enough of each other at the moment. It’s an insatiable hunger.

It’s not _incredible_ sex – neither of them are particularly skilled or experienced at the act. There’s been a lot of trial and error, a lot of awkwardness, a lot of learning about each other’s bodies, but the chemistry is something else. Jaime makes her belly flip when she looks at him. And the way he looks at her …

But it’s got good lately. After two months of fucking, they have just about got to the stage where they know that if Jaime leans slightly to one side, and Brienne wraps her legs around his arse just so, then his pubic bone grinds against her clit as he thrusts into her, and oh yes! She can come during intercourse.

That’s _never_ happened to her before, and he’s bursting with pride to be the first to do it. Embarrassing really, to be learning the art of love at thirty-four and forty-five, but better late than never. It’s a beautiful thing, it really is.

Just like what he’s doing to her now with his fingers. He’s good with his fingers, much better now he can use his right hand again. He has her moaning already. Begging him not to stop.

He stops. Right before she goes over the edge. Makes her beg. Laughs at her torment. Starts again when she pleads, his hot mouth on her nipple too. He never teases her long.

She arches her neck, screwing her eyes tight shut. Grabs the pillows, presses her hand over his. Lets out the most ridiculous squeak as he takes her over the edge. Grunts. Squeaks again.

He kisses her hard. Lips and tongue and breath, warm and soft and tasting of Jaime. She opens her eyes to gaze into his, but he’s not looking at her. He’s looking upwards even as his tongue slides over hers.

She twists to see what he’s looking at.

He’s holding his phone above them in his left hand, camera on. The screen filled with their faces, kissing.

She pulls out of the kiss. “Are you … filming us?” she asks, not quite able to believe what she’s seeing.

“You,” he whispers. “I’m filming you.”

“What?!”

“A week’s a long time. I miss seeing you when I’m back home working. I miss seeing how you look when you come.”

“Jaime!”

He pulls back a little, his eyes suddenly worried. “Is that not … okay?”

“No! You … you’re making a film of me coming, without my consent? Of course it’s not okay!”

“You make it sound kind of rapey.”

“It _is_ kind of rapey, Jaime!”

“Oh,” he sits up, having the good grace to look very shamefaced. “Oh. I’m sorry. Really. I’ll delete it. I – I didn’t think of it like that.”

He fiddles with his phone, his erection wilting against his leg.

Brienne is staggered – she stares at him, dumbfounded. Sometimes it’s like dating a teenager, a very sheltered one.

“I’m not going to be able to come back next weekend,” he tells her with a pout. “My father is holding a family get-together. My brother got married unexpectedly.”

“Oh?” Brienne hadn’t even known Jaime had a brother. He never talks about his family.

“Yeah,” he smirks. “He married a pole dancer from Lorath. My father is _not_ happy!”

He gets up and walks to her kitchen area. She has a pot of coffee on the go and he refills his cup, and hers as well.

They snuggle together beneath the comforter to drink it. Outside the snow is laying thick and the window is fogged from all the body heat inside. Jaime puts his arm around Brienne and pulls her close to nuzzle her neck. It feels nice.

“Maybe you should come with me,” he says. Almost tentatively.

“To Casterly?”

He shrugs. “Yeah. If you took the red-eye the other way, Friday night … we could stay at my place instead. Saturday, rock up at the party together. If you want to.”

“Meet your parents?”

“Well, my father. My mother – she’s gone.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“No – no, not _dead_ gone. Left. Haven’t seen her since I was eight.”

“Oh.”

“Only if you want to. I know that sounds a bit serious-relationshippy, but it might take a bit of the heat off my brother if I bring a girl home too.”

“A _girl_?”

“A woman, you know what I mean. A girlfriend.”

“Do they know about me?”

“My brother does. Tyrion. I had to tell him – he was worried about me last year.”

Brienne can see why. Now Jaime has cleaned up, stopped the drugs and the excessive drinking, he’s a different man. Funny instead of biting, generous and interesting and _damn_ good looking. She’s starting to wonder what he sees in _her_.

“Okay,” she says. Not sure she’s making the right decision, but letting her curiosity get the better of her. As open as he’s been with his body and his affections, he’s been very cagey talking about his past. There’s never been a suggestion that she might go to _his_ place.

And he’s such an unusual man. Perhaps meeting his family will crack Jaime Lannister open a little.

“Really?” he says with surprise.

“Why not?”

He looks pleased enough, but there’s a hesitation too, a nervousness. They abandon the coffee and fuck enthusiastically, hard enough to make her bed creak, loud enough that the miserable old man upstairs bangs on the floor and yells at them to shut up. It’s the seventh time they’ve pissed him off so far this weekend – it’s something of a point of pride for Jaime.

 _Like dating a teenager_ , she thinks again. _Excited by the fact he’s having sex._

They take a shower together, crammed into the tiny stall, getting alternately frozen and burned by the temperamental water temperature in her building. Kissing as they soap each other, gazing into each other’s eyes as they kiss.

He’s hard again by the time they get out, and they stumble back to her bed for another round – and oh it’s just so lovely. The slow slide of his hips, of his lips, of his tongue. The warmth of his body, the rough bite of the hair on his chest against her nipples, the feel of his skin under her fingertips as she strokes him. Wrapping her legs around his arse and taking him deep inside her – so deep it makes him moan and clutch at the sheets to try to keep his control.

The rest of the world just melts away. There’s only Jaime, fucking Jaime – the world doesn’t exist beyond his efforts to make her come, and her efforts to make him come too. The world is filled with hard breathing, with breathy moans and groans and grunts and growls, the slap of skin on skin, the creak of her ancient mattress.

His weight against her clit, again, again, again, _again_. His cock inside her, thrusting, _thrusting._ Fire and lightning, streaking down her legs, burning in her belly, curling her toes and stiffening her hips. Escaping her mouth in desperate whimpers and pleas not to stop, please don’t stop, she’s so close, so _close_ …

She flings her head back as it races through her – she hears her own voice give a strangled cry, both hands on his arse cheeks holding him deep inside her.

He kisses her hard and gazes into her eyes. Then whispers “Ride me,” in her ear. Not the most romantic sentiment, but he’s already pulled out of her to roll on his back beside her.

She swings a leg over his hips, settling easily back onto his cock. Jaime grabs her hips, thrusting wildly up into her.

“Hold me down,” he grunts. Arms over his head, inviting her to pin his wrists. She does, leaning on him with all her strength. He struggles beneath her as if trying to fight her, but he doesn’t try _that_ hard.

He comes in less than a minute, roaring her name when he does.

Then he collapses onto the pillows, eyes closed, panting and moaning inarticulately.

“What should I wear?” she asks.

“Wha -?” He opens his eyes, still panting.

“To your father’s party. What sort of thing should I wear?”

“Do we need to talk about my father _right_ now?”

“I might need to buy something.”

“Uh … usually black tie.”

“Black tie?!”

“It’s a wedding reception. Sort of. Just look dressy – whatever you want will be fine.”

He sits up and helps her off him. Sorts the condom out, looking absolutely shattered.

“Dressy?” she pushes.

“Yeah.”

“Like _a_ dress?”

He looks up at her from beneath his long hair. “Yeah. If you want. What do you wear if the Starks have a party?”

“A suit.”

“Trouser suit?”

“It’s kind of hard to find a cocktail dress when you’re my size.”

“A trouser suit is fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s going to spend most of the night on my bedroom floor, so yeah, I’m sure.”

But Brienne’s not so sure. She’s going home to meet his folks – are they going to be impressed by the giant woman in a cheap off-the-peg man’s suit? She knows what most people’s first impression of her is – a great lumbering beast.

She usually gets wide-eyed stares, sometimes followed by pithy remarks or even laughter. It’s going to hurt – it always does, and she’s worried it will hurt Jaime too.

The past two months have been something of an oasis – this will be the first time they’ve exposed their relationship to the public gaze.

She turns to talk to him some more, but he’s fallen asleep, curled into her pillows and sucking his thumb like a little kid.

He looks so cute, so sweet that she feels a little pang in her belly that he’s going to be leaving her in just a few short hours.

She mentally slaps herself – she has to be careful. Keep this casual. Make damn sure. She’s worried that seeing the reactions of others might make him remember she’s the Unbeddable Hulk.

He doesn’t seem scared, though. Not of this, not of _feelings_. Jaime’s an in-with-both-feet kind of guy, she can tell. He’s used to being in a relationship, too, which Brienne is not. Loving the person you’re fucking seems normal and natural to him, but in Brienne’s experience, it’s foolishness.

Last time she’d thrown herself at a man, he’d turned out to be gay. He’d fucked her to make his boyfriend jealous and he’d broken her gods-damned heart. She can’t do that again – it had taken her the best part of a year to get over the humiliation.

It worries her that she and Jaime haven’t even had a proper date yet. That they haven’t really talked about their lives and families. The physical attraction is strong, there’s no denying that, but she’s not sure they can call this a relationship yet. She’s not sure she’s ready.

She gets into bed and they sleep until his alarm sounds mid-afternoon. They fuck again as a last hurrah, shower, and call a cab to the airport for him. They share lingering kisses in the elevator, and again in the hallway, and finally as he gets into the cab. He waves to her as he disappears down the street, his eyes suspiciously moist. Brienne swallows a painful lump in her throat.

The week passes in a haze of society parties with the Stark girls, propping herself against a wall in one venue after another, standing by while they take endless selfies and get wasted on a never-ending stream of pretty pink drinks.

All Brienne can think about is Jaime. Her body aches for his body and her life feels empty without him to come home to.

By Tuesday he’s taken to sending her messages at work. Innocent at first, just asking her how her night is going, saying he misses her and is looking forward to seeing her. They converse back and forth by text, and end the night with a sweet little phonecall to say goodnight.

Wednesday he sends a video of himself blowing her a kiss. She sends one back, ducking into the bathroom to film it while the Stark girls dance the night away.

Her phone is vibrating in her pocket by the time she gets back out into the club. She pulls it out to see his response and almost drops it into her drink.

There, full-screen, well-lit and in her face, is a picture of Jaime’s cock. Fully erect and wrapped in his hand. Underneath, it says _Thinking about you._

She shuts her phone off as quick as she can, rams it into her pocket.

What the fuck is he thinking? He’s _so_ immature! She can feel her face burning bright red – _anyone_ could have seen that, including Sansa and Arya. He could have got her fired.

But it’s not just a random cock, sent by some idiot on a dating app. It’s a cock she’s invested serious time into lovingly sucking, a cock she knows intimately, a cock that’s given her a lot of pleasure. And she must admit that as shocking as it is, the sight of it has left her distinctly flustered.

She has to look again.

She surreptitiously backs into a dark corner and pulls her phone out – making sure the Stark girls are occupied with their partying first. Pulls the photo up again and studies it.

He’s sat down on a chair – it looks like leather. Shirt unbuttoned, trousers unzipped. Member exposed and absolutely at full arousal. It’s dark with blood and wet at the tip. Brienne’s mouth waters.

_Thinking about you._

She imagines straddling him as he sits there, lowering herself slowly onto that rock-hard piece of meat, feeling it stretch and fill her cunt as Jaime – beautiful Jaime – groans into her mouth. Gods. She’s wet now. Really wet.

_Thinking about you too._

She sends back with shaking fingers.

 _Show me,_ he says.

How in all the hells is she meant to do that? _I’m at work,_ she says.

 _So am I._  Accompanied by another photo of his cock, sticking straight up in front of a desk and a laptop. _Not much fun with only these spreadsheets to look at._

Sansa and Arya are still dancing, so Brienne slinks back to the restroom. It’s horrifically unprofessional, but gods, she can’t resist.

She sets her phone up, propping it on the toilet roll holder with the camera open, setting it to timer. Pulls her t-shirt up – she hasn’t bothered with a bra tonight. Her nipples look very hard and very pink in the harsh lights of the bathroom, and she squeezes her tits together with the tops of her arms to try and give herself some cleavage.

She lets them go – it looks ridiculous. And Jaime doesn’t care that her tits are small, her body turns him on well enough. She snaps a photo of her tits and sends it to him quickly, before she loses her nerve.

She’s adjusting her clothing when her phone starts to ring. It’s Jaime. On a video call.

This is a mistake. A huge mistake. But she answers it nonetheless.

He’s grinning from ear to ear. “Good enough to eat,” he says. “Now let’s see the rest.”

She considers refusing, but she’s so turned on right now it hurts. Her body has got so used to the regular sex that even the thought of Jaime during the week has her dripping wet.

“Show me your cock,” she demands.

He laughs, and switches the camera on his phone so it’s facing his crotch. It’s still just as hard, pulsing slightly in time with his heartbeat. He’s stroking the head gently, and she can hear his harsh breathing.

“Fuck,” she hears herself say.

He laughs. “Am I making you wet?”

“Oh yes.”

“I wanna see.”

This is so stupid. So reckless. So Jaime. She yanks her jeans open and shoves her hands in her panties, letting out an involuntary whimper as her fingertips brush her clit. He bites his lip as he watches her plunge two fingers inside herself, pulls them out sticky and shiny. Holds them up for the camera and then sticks them both into her mouth.

“Father, Mother, Maiden, Crone!” he says. “Can you get yourself off?”

She laughs. “Very probably!”

“Do it. Gods please. I need to see that.”

She almost refuses – she’s never had phone sex before, let alone videocall sex. She’s worried she’s not going to look any good doing it.

But she’s being stupid. He’s seen every single part of her body at extremely close range – he’s licked her places she never thought she’d be licked – if there was anything about her he found repulsive he would have demurred by now.

 _Fuck it_. She pulls one leg out of her jeans and panties and props it on the toilet bowl. He has a screenful of her sex now, of her fingers frantically working at her clit.

On her screen, his fist speeds up on his cock, and she can hear him grunt. She knows that grunt – he won’t last long.

Hells, she won’t last long herself. Her knees buckle and her jaw clenches, breath hissing between her teeth. The pleasure is building, taking her over, and despite her best efforts, she’s crying out loudly.

“Come for me,” Jaime says.

She comes. Shuddering, groaning, almost crying with pleasure. Collapsing against the wall hard enough to rock the cubicle.

She opens her eyes to see that Jaime has come too – his laptop is splattered with his load and he’s panting hard.

“Damn, that was amazing,” he manages, turning his camera round to show his grinning face. “Never done that before.”

Brienne nods – she’s a little beyond words right now.

“I’d better clean up,” he says with a smirk. “I’ll let you get back to work.” He blows her a kiss. “Can’t wait for the weekend.”

He terminates the call, leaving Brienne a bit bewildered.

She pulls her jeans and panties back on and leaves the cubicle. Only to be confronted by Sansa and Arya, right outside, their arms folded. Arya has a smirk on her face.

“What are you _doing_?” asks Sansa.

Brienne opens her mouth. Closes it again.

“She’s having phone sex with her new boyfriend,” Arya says.

“No!” Brienne protests. “I didn’t. I wasn’t!”

Sansa looks horrified. “ _Brienne_ has a boyfriend?!”

“Remember that gross tramp who got his jeans nicked?”

Sansa makes a puke face. “Ugh, no way! Brienne!”

“He’s a very nice man,” Brienne says, feeling her face burn.

“We heard,” smirks Arya.

Brienne puts her phone in her pocket and goes to wash her hands. Arya blocks her way.

“So,” she says. “Are you going to take us up to the new club in Mole’s Town?”

“Gods no!” The place is an absolute dive.

But Arya isn’t finished. “Or are we going to tell Mother you were wanking in the toilets when you should have been chaperoning us?”

Brienne sighs. “Mole’s Town,” she says wearily.

Sansa grins. “I’ll get our coats.”

After that incident, Brienne pretty much spends the rest of the week as Sansa and Arya’s bitch. She sees the very worst of Westeros’s nightlife and has to break more than her fair share of noses to keep them safe.

By the time she’s boarding her plane to the Westerlands on Friday, she’s wondering whether it was worth it. But she’s on her way to Jaime. She can deal with her two charges when she gets back.

She sleeps on the plane, knowing she probably won’t get much at the other end. The flight is smooth and painless, but despite an almost-empty arrivals lounge, she doesn’t see him when she gets off the plane. Then she hears him call her name.

Her breath catches. She didn’t recognise him.

She guesses he’s come straight from work, dressed in a three-piece suit and a heavy dress coat, a cashmere scarf around his neck. Brienne gapes. She’s looking at a thousand dragons’ worth of suit, without a doubt. At least another five hundred for the shoes as well.

She doubts she has spent five hundred dragons on all the shoes she’s bought in her lifetime.

“You okay?” he asks. He looks a little uneasy.

“Oh! Yes. Great,” she manages. Feeling distinctly underdressed in her jeans and sweater.

He takes her bag for her, and leans up to give her an enthusiastic kiss. “Come on, the car’s waiting.”

She follows him out of the terminal building and into the cold night air. She thinks they’ll head towards the parking lot, but instead he leads her to the pickup zone. There’s a gleaming black town car waiting, and he opens the back door with a flourish.

“That’s yours?” she asks.

“One of my father’s,” he says. “Get in.”

She gets in. He puts her suitcase in the trunk and joins her in the back.

There’s a driver in the front, a big guy with a scarred face. He nods at Brienne, but doesn’t speak.

“Seven blessings,” she says. An old-fashioned greeting no one has used in a generation. No idea how it just came out of her mouth.

The big guy sneers. Starts the engine.

Jaime grins and closes the blind between the back and the front. “I’ve missed you so much,” he whispers, and pulls her into his arms.

His mouth is hungry on hers, if unusually tentative. It’s pretty clear he doesn’t want to wait to get back to his place before he fucks her, though. He’s got her jeans undone and a mouth on her nipple before they’ve even left the airport. She’s glad she didn’t bother with a bra.

He pulls her jeans over her hips, taking her panties with them. Pushes her back on the wide seats and dips his face between her thighs.

“Is that soundproof?” she asks, pointing to the blind between them and the driver.

“Nope.”

Brienne bites her lip as he goes down on her, clinging to the back of her seat to stop herself sliding onto the floor as they go round the corners.

As always, it takes Jaime a while to get his rhythm right, and being in the back of a moving vehicle doesn’t help. It takes him most of the journey to bring her to orgasm, but he’s very pleased with himself when he does.

He kisses his way up her body and shares the taste of her cunt with her. His hands go to his trousers and shucks them halfway down his thighs, cock sticking proudly up in front of him. He produces a condom from his pocket with a cheeky grin, rolls it on and thrusts inside her with a barely-suppressed groan.

A brief worry about staining that insanely expensive suit flashes through Brienne’s mind, but she’s wrapping her legs around him and he’s thrusting into her so hard that every thought in her head is quickly replaced by something very very carnal.

She’s moaning and he’s kissing her to shut her up, and she’s urging him, harder and harder and harder, and just when she feels it, just when she feels like an orgasm is within her reach …

Jaime pulls out. Sits up. Pulls his trousers up. She, belatedly, realises the car has stopped.

He grins at her. “We’re here.”

“Wha?”

“My place. We’ll have to continue this upstairs, my father needs the car.”

He buttons his coat to hide his erection and opens the door before she’s even pulled her panties up. The cold winter air hits her heated flesh in a rush, making her shiver. She yelps in protest but he just laughs at her mad scramble to cover herself. He grabs her suitcase from the trunk.

They are in an underground parking structure – presumably below his building. Jaime takes her hand and leads her into the elevator, saying goodnight to his surly driver and receiving no response at all.

As soon as the elevator doors close they are on each other again, kissing, grasping, thrusting their bodies against each other. Brienne is dizzy with want, absolutely consumed by him, by her own desperate need to get him back inside her. Gods this is something else.

He pushes her out of the elevator, into the plush hallway beyond. Backs her up against the door and gets it unlocked without even disengaging his tongue from hers.

They tumble inside, hitting the floor in a tangle of limbs. Jaime kicks the door shut behind him and falls on top of her. They are cushioned by a thick, generous rug, and already she knows they aren’t getting any further – she tears at his clothes, and he tears at hers. He’s inside her in a matter of seconds, still in his coat, trousers round his knees, her jeans bunched up around one ankle.

The noises they make are pure animalism, grunting and growling and huffing and hissing. His touch, his body, his sex inside hers – just the smell of him, the taste of his tongue … Brienne is overwhelmed, out of her body, seeing stars. Stars everywhere.

She rips her lips from his to howl at the open sky, head flung back, hips thrust off the floor. He roars, grasping her thighs and holding her legs up even higher so he can come deep inside her.

They collapse, breathing raggedly. Their joined sexes still twitching and throbbing.

“Fuck,” Jaime says at last, pressing his sweaty forehead against Brienne’s chin. “I love … I love fucking you.”

He notices his stumble, but she’s too fucked to care.

Brienne is inarticulate. She has to admit, practice makes perfect. Something about this man lights her on fire. She literally saw stars when she came.

She opens her eyes. She can still see stars.

Stars everywhere, but they are not an orgasm-induced hallucination. One wall of Jaime’s apartment, and half of the ceiling, is glass.

She gets up, leaving Jaime on his knees to sort out the condom and walks out of the entranceway and into his apartment proper. Her jeans trailing behind her from one ankle. Her mouth open and her eyes wide.

It’s _huge_. Huge. Her studio isn’t even as big as his kitchen.

But more than that, too – it’s beautiful. He lives in the penthouse, and it’s open plan with a mezzanine upper level which overlooks that incredible floor-to-ceiling view over the city. She’s seen money in the Starks’ house, but this is another level altogether. This is _opulence._

Every piece of furniture is exquisite – carefully chosen, carefully placed. Polished wood floors and marble worktops. A spotless glass dining table. A huge leather couch and an inviting cuddle chair. Expensive rugs, a massive TV. A kitchen with a range and an island in the middle. Every single mod con you could imagine.

Jaime follows her. Puts his keys on the coffee table. He looks uncomfortable at her open-mouthed wonder.

“Your father really is a billionaire, isn’t he.” Brienne says at last.

“Yeah.” He pushes his hair out of his eyes. “Is that a problem?”

“No! No, I – I just can’t believe you’ve been happy to come to my place every weekend.”

“What’s wrong with your place?”

“It’s a shithole! This … this …”

He shrugs. “I come to see _you_ , not swap interior design tips.”

She thinks in shame about her grotty, old-fashioned kitchen. About her tiny TV and her creaking old rocking chair. About the broken-springed thrift-store bed they’ve been banging on all this time. If she’d known …

“Are you hungry?” he asks. “I’ve been working a lot this week, but I got my chef to leave us some food for the weekend.”

His chef! Brienne feels a little faint. “I could eat,” she manages.

He pokes about in his cavernous fridge and comes out with a plate of exquisitely-prepared tapas. She bends down to sort her jeans out, and when they are back on, he passes her a bottle of a very expensive imported beer. Gestures at the sofa.

It’s wide and soft and really comfortable – Jaime kicks off his shoes and dumps his jacket to relax among the myriad of down-filled throw pillows. Brienne perches on the edge, not quite able to fit her legs comfortably between the sofa and the coffee table. Drinks from her beer.

“You okay?” he asks.

She’s not. She’s really not. She’s a bit shell-shocked by his place, a bit intimidated. Everything in this room looks like it cost more than her annual salary. She hadn’t realised – they’re not just from different worlds, they’re from different universes.

How is she going to go to the party tomorrow in that cheap suit? It turns out her ugliness is the least of her worries. How is she going to hang on Jaime’s arm like an equal? She’s going to look like a gold-digger.

She nods and smiles, though. Not wanting to hurt him. Trying to force herself to eat some of the tapas. It’s amazing – full of flavour and perfectly presented like high-class restaurant food.

“It’s nice, yeah?” he asks.

“Very.”

“The beer too?”

“Oh yes.”

“You’re really quiet.”

“Sorry. I – I think you literally fucked my brains out,” she lies.

He laughs. “I missed you a _lot_.”

“I missed you, too.”

They gaze at each other for a long moment, and Jaime lifts his hand to gently stroke down the line of her cheek. “Brienne,” he says. Just to say her name.

She leans towards him and he meets her halfway, catching her lips with his.

“Let’s finish eating, and I’ll uh … show you the bedroom.”

That will be good, she thinks. Naked, in her arms, Jaime will feel like Jaime again, not like a billionaire’s son. Not like a penthouse apartment, a town car and a driver, not like a million dragons’ worth of designer furniture. She smiles and nods, and drinks her beer.

Upstairs, the bedroom mezzanine is equally as impressive as downstairs. The bed is situated right below the vast skylight, giving a feel of sleeping out in the open air.

The bed is massive, too. At hers, the two of them have to cuddle up to stop themselves from falling out of bed while they sleep, but on Jaime’s they could each lie with arms outstretched and not be able to hold hands.

He knows. He _knows._ She can see in his eyes – a kind of shame and a kind of embarrassment. She wishes she’d covered her reaction a little better.

“It’s beautiful,” she says softly. “Your apartment. Why didn’t you show me before?”

He shrugs. “I wanted you to see _me_. Not all this, this … Lannister gold.”

But now he’s letting her see it all, she realises. Revealing something precious, something vulnerable. Something that makes him vulnerable to her.

He’s showing her that he trusts her.

She trusts him, too. Needs him to know.

She disrobes him slowly, taking time to kiss every inch of skin she exposes, inhaling the scent of him, kissing and nibbling at his skin with her lips and teeth. Holding his eyes, holding his body. Holding her hand over his heart and seeing the fear ebb from his eyes.

They make love slowly, achingly, every pore of Brienne’s skin singing at the touch of Jaime’s. Their bodies moving in perfect sync, their pleasure building together. Locked hands, locked eyes, shared smiles and soft sighs.

After they have taken each other to the edge of the seven heavens and back, they lie wrapped in each other’s arms, softly kissing and gazing at the stars. Neither of them speak.

There’s a note of something building in Brienne’s chest, something beautiful and overwhelming and so foolhardy that she doesn’t dare give it a name.

She knows he feels it too. It’s in every touch, every look. In everything he whispers. Every slow, lingering kiss.

It’s dangerous. So dangerous. But there it is – she loves him.

She loves Jaime.

She loves him.

He falls asleep on her chest, and as Brienne gazes up at the skylight, it starts to snow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading and hope you have all had a lovely festive season.
> 
> But huge huge thanks particularly to CaptainTarthister for just being the most fabulous person in the world to write for and for just being balls-out smut. I have endless fun writing for her and I have learned so much. You're just a lovely person!


	3. Don't Make Me Angry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaime takes Brienne to meet his family.

Brienne comes out of the bathroom looking nervous as hells. Hair slicked back, bare-faced, but in her suit. The one she’s been shitting herself about ever since Jaime had invited her to Tyrion’s wedding reception.

“You look very lovely,” he tells her.

She does. She looks like a normal person. Honest. Refreshing. Not a flashy stuffed shirt in a made-to-measure outfit, or like Cersei would have – thousands of dragons-worth of dress and dripping with the knowledge that she would be the best-looking woman in the room.

She looks gorgeous because she looks normal. Because she doesn’t look like a Lannister. He can’t tell her that, though. Instead he takes her face in both his hands and kisses her, slowly and meltingly, until his insides turn to mush.

Jaime loves Brienne. He’s besotted.

He shouldn’t be – it’s far too soon, he knows that. He knows she has huge reservations about him, and there’s one hell of a can of worms he hasn’t even opened yet. But Gods, how could he _not_ love Brienne Tarth?

Yeah she’s 6’3”, yeah she doesn’t have the most feminine of physiques and yeah she has a surlier face than most truck drivers. But the tenderness of the woman, the kindness, the sheer _strength_ of her, inside and out! It does things to him, things that he’s at a loss to explain.

Things that turn him on to the point of madness. He gets hard thinking about the sound of Brienne’s voice, and can practically make himself come hands-free when he remembers how it feels to be wrapped in her endless legs. He only feels alive when he’s fucking her.

“I got you a present,” he whispers against her lips between kisses.

Her huge blue eyes go wide.

“Jaime, I can’t –“

There’s the look. He’s seen it all his life, on face after face. When you’re the son of a billionaire, you really can’t buy someone a gift without it being a hugely loaded gesture. You’re either patronising them, or trying to buy them, or just plain showing off.

Jaime sighs. “It’s not that exciting. Here.”

He slides a box over to her. She opens it with terrified eyes, clearly worried it’s something she’s not going to be able to afford to insure.

“Oh,” she says. “Jaime …”

It’s a watch. Not an expensive one, not an exclusive one, just one he saw advertised while he was online at work, one that he thought Brienne might like. A brown leather strap, a blued-steel bezel, a black face. It’s plain and functional – smart enough for smart, unassuming enough for casual.

Jaime grits his teeth. He probably looks like a stingy boyfriend now, standing in his tailored Baratheon suit in his west coast penthouse apartment. Buying her a hundred Dragon watch instead of a diamond as big as her head.

But she’s got it on her wrist. Holding it at arms’ length to admire it. She looks at him and smiles.

“I really like it,” she says.

“Really?! Oh good!”

He’s so relieved. A bit overcome, if he’s honest. Lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

“Thank you.”

She lays a kiss on him so sweet and soft that he almost tears that suit back off her and fucks her in nothing but the watch, but he manages to restrain himself. His father is sending The Hound to pick them up in about twenty minutes, and he can’t keep his father waiting, not even for a piece of the most exquisite cunt in all the Seven States of Westeros.

His father.

Just bringing Tywin Lannister’s sour, ice-cold face to mind makes Jaime sweat. Tonight is, after all, a colossal gamble. Taking Brienne to this party – pure, kind-hearted, lovely Brienne – in a room full of Lannisters and Tyrells and all the hangers-on … what is he thinking? It’s like sacrificing a maiden to the Stranger.

But he has to.

He and Brienne have been in a bubble – a perfect, happy, sex-filled bubble. A bubble their real lives haven’t touched yet. It’s been wonderful, in every way, but it’s been utterly static.

If they want things to move on, if they want things to get serious, (and Jaime desperately _does)_ then he has to bring her into his life. It’s all got to come out. His terrifying father, his drunken brother. His weird childhood. The money – all the money and everything and everyone it’s bought.

And, of course, Cersei.

That’s going to be the big one. He’s going to have to build up to that. Thankfully Cersei and Tyrion haven’t spoken in years, so at least there’s no chance his twin will be there tonight. Brienne will only have to deal with the peripheral weirdness of Lannister life.

Suddenly he can’t seem to let her go. He kisses her neck while she brushes her hair, helps her into her shoes and coat, and then holds her hand all the way down to the parking lot beneath his building. Terrified.

The Hound is waiting for them, looking as unkempt as always and almost snarling when Jaime greets him. He doesn’t say a word as he holds the car door open for them, nor as he gets behind the wheel and starts the engine.

Brienne looks calm. Jaime not so much – he feels desperate for a line of powdered poppymilk up his nose. His hands are shaking.

He wonders if Brienne was expecting some fooling about in the back of the car on the way to the party – this is probably the longest he’s ever gone without having his hands all over her in months. But he feels sick and he doubts his cock could get hard right now if he had a troupe of naked Briennes to attempt the act.

“What are you doing?” she asks him from across the seat. He’s bouncing his legs nervously, rubbing his hands together, too.

“Dying,” he jokes.

The streetlights outside light her face up orange, as if in firelight, and for a moment he sees an image of her, bloody and bruised and beaten.

He knows it’s just his brain’s metaphor for taking her into the lion’s den with him, but it chills him to the bone.

“You’re so craven,” she laughs. “It’s only a party.”

_Only a party,_ he tells himself. _Could it be true?_ A few drinks, congratulate Tyrion and his new wife, do a once-round the room, and they can go home. Home, back to his bed, back to the heavens he finds between her thighs and in her mouth and suckling at her pointy little nipples.

Once she’s met everyone, seen the house he grew up in, he’ll be able to open up more. It will be easier. He can start to talk about his childhood, try to explain some of the weirdness. Let her in and see if she wants to stay. Start to gently move towards telling her about Cersei.

The Hound turns off onto the long winding road that leads up inexorably to The Rock.

The whole way up, Jaime’s childhood home looms large over them, black and formidable and joyless as ever. Brienne gawps at it, her eyes wide, mouth open. Speechless.

“Is this …?”

Jaime smiles and shrugs.

His father, dramatic as always, has set flaming braziers up the length of the long driveway. To Jaime, it feels like they are driving through the gates to the darkest of the seven hells, but Brienne looks impressed.

Jaime clings to her hand as they get out of the car.

Inside, it’s the usual cacophony of polite noise. Chatter. Laughter. A string quartet playing The Rains of Castermere. Jaime suspects it’s been the same for generations. The party is in the main hall, bedecked in thousands of dragons’ worth of beautiful flowers. Banners and tapestries and silk draperies. It’s not quite as lavish as it was for Cersei’s wedding, but it’s still gaudy and extravagant.

No sooner than he and Brienne have crossed the threshold than Tyrion rushes up to them.

“You’re late!” he hisses at Jaime. “I told you not to leave me alone with these people.”

“Traffic was terrible,” Jaime lies.

Tyrion glowers at him, and then clocks Brienne. Does a double-take. Looks at Jaime. Looks back at Brienne.

“Are you Brienne?” he asks. “Wow.” It’s not altogether a kind “wow”, but it’s Tyrion. Drunk as he clearly is, he knows how to be diplomatic. He takes Brienne’s hand firmly in both of his. “Welcome to Casterly Rock, Brienne. I’m Tyrion Lannister, Jaime’s brother.”

“Thank you,” she says. “Pleased to meet you.”

“And you. Please, help yourself to some food, my father has gone to great expense.”

He gestures to the huge buffet table behind them, and Brienne politely goes to examine the contents.

“Sorry,” Jaime says to his brother. “I should have introduced you.”

The truth is, he’s having something close to a panic attack. The room is full to the brim of snakes, he realises. His Aunt Genna, his Uncles Tyg and Kevan. A myriad of cousins (though thankfully not Lancel). Lots and lots of Westerlands hangers-on – minor politicians and celebrities and local movers and shakers that his father loathes but tolerates in case they prove useful at some point. And of course, Tywin’s current bedmates the Tyrells, who he’s been courting for the past year for a giant business deal that Jaime is supposed to be instrumental in but so far hasn’t been trusted with the details of.

It’s a myriad of one-upmanship and backstabbing, all gently clothed in smiles and hors-d’oeuvres. Jaime hates it. He’s not good at it and he finds it exhausting. How is he going to prepare Brienne for this world?

Cersei was its master – she would have glided through this room like an elegant swan, green eyes alight and alive, every movement she made perfectly calculated, perfectly posed. Jaime can see her now, hair beautiful and golden in the candlelight – the perfect dress, the perfect body inside that dress.

He would have ached watching her – ached with that nameless feeling that he had dressed up as love over the years with Cersei. That feeling had been huge – all encompassing. Incredibly powerful, a feeling of destiny and purity and perfection. A feeling of being incomplete without Cersei in his arms, a feeling that only she made his life worthwhile. He could not deny that.

But that feeling had never made him happy.

His relationship with Cersei had been thunderous – huge explosions of passion, huge fights and so much crisis. Violence and then desire. Coercion and complicity. Clinging to each other. Declaring over and over that they would never be complete without the other, that they were the only two people in the world. When Jaime hadn’t been with Cersei the pain was indescribable – he had felt her, touched her, tasted her in literally everything he’d seen and done.

But now, he’s been with Brienne. For two months and one week.

His feelings are intense, but they’re not insane. They’re gentle. Kind.

His world had been rocked when Brienne had made him some toast for the first time. Just some buttered toast. But she’d given him the plate as he’d lain sated and exhausted after an enthusiastic bout of fucking in her dilapidated little bed. As she’d passed it, she’d leaned down to peck a quick kiss on his forehead.

That kiss had been a revelation – it had hit Jaime like a thunderbolt.

Affection. Just casual affection. He’d never had affection from Cersei that he hadn’t begged for, or that he hadn’t had to take from her by force. Not a kiss, not a hug, not a handhold, not a hand laid upon his knee. He hadn’t realised that before.

Brienne had kissed him like it was nothing! Like she’d wanted to, like he was someone dear to her. Jaime had never felt dear to anyone in his life, not like that. Not to anyone in his family. He’d been useful, he’d been talented, he’d been the golden son and heir. But not … not _loved_. Not since his mother left – and he supposed that she could not have loved him all that much either if she’d been able to leave without a backward glance.

Brienne had chatted amiably as she’d poured them both some coffee and Jaime had lain there stunned. Blown away.

When she’d brought the coffee to him, he’d put it on the bedside table and pulled her to him, silent. Held her eyes with his as he’d rolled her underneath him, one hand already in the condom box. They’d both been saddle-sore, and tired as hell, but Jaime remembers it was the most profound fuck of his life.

Brienne’s ocean-blue eyes, her peach-soft skin. Her ugly grunting as she clung to his arse with both her hands, angling him and moving him to get pressure where she needed it.

Jaime had just wept. Surrendered himself to this woman utterly, melted into her skin and died at her kisses.

She’d thrust her insanely-long legs skyward at the moment she came, toes pointed at the ceiling. The squeeze of her thighs and the cling of her embrace had brought him over the edge as well. He’d howled like a beast, tears rolling down his face. He’d never had an orgasm like it.

Not just the physical sensation, but her love. Her _love_. He’d been filled with it, filled to the brim, until it had nowhere to go but spill out of him as wracking sobs. He hadn’t been able to stop crying.  
  
How did he deserve Brienne? He remembered wondering that as he cried, panting and useless on top of her, his heart hammering against hers. How had he managed to do this?

She’d raised her sex-flushed face from the pillows to look at him with wide eyes. Asked him if he was okay.

He’d laughed then, and she’d laughed too, though he didn’t think she knew why. She was looking at him like he’d gone completely mad. He’d lifted his lips to hers and they’d kissed. He’d known then that he was in love. That was weekend number two.

Now it’s weekend number nine, and he’s about to do the unthinkable. Introduce Brienne to his father.

He sees his father across the room. Most people when they are hosting a party at least make the attempt to look as though they are enjoying themselves, or that they are enjoying the company of those they have invited, but not Tywin Lannister.

His irritation, his impatience for the whole affair is quite naked on Jaime’s father’s face. He stands aloof from proceedings, flanked at each shoulder by his younger brothers, each a commanding presence in their own right, but both utterly dwarfed by the implacable stature of Tywin.

Jaime swallows. He’s been rehearsing this moment.

_Hello, father. I’d like to introduce you to Brienne Tarth._

Ten words. Ten words it’s taken him all week to come up with, ten words that still feel both madly inadequate and totally foolish. Ten words he’s worried he will regret for the rest of his life.

At his side, Tyrion looks up to his big brother sympathetically.

“Don’t worry,” he slurs. “He only called Shae a gold-digging whore to her face twice.” He necks another glass of red.

“Shae!” Jaime says. “I’m so sorry. Tyrion … I haven’t met your wife yet.”

Tyrion sighs. “I’d introduce you, but she’s locked herself in my bedroom. I don’t think she’s speaking to me after that.”

“Oh.”

Tyrion makes a face. “Oh indeed. I thought she may need a little space, and I _certainly_ need a little Dornish courage.” He waves his wine glass.

Jaime swallows. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

“Oh, it could be worse. Cersei could be here.”

Jaime laughs, a little hysterically. “Don’t,” he says.

“Does she know?”

“Cersei?”

“Brienne.”

“No! No. Not - not yet.”

Tyrion winces.

“I know.”

He must look terrified, because Tyrion is looking at him with very sad eyes. He takes Jaime’s hand gently and squeezes it.

He hopes that Tyrion will say something soothing like _It will be okay_ or _She’ll understand if she loves you_ but he doesn’t. He just takes another long slug of his wine and smiles at Jaime sadly.

Brienne comes back then, passing him some of the food she’s collected. He manages to choke down a canape, but nothing more.

“Right,” he says then. “We’d better do this, hadn’t we.”

Brienne raises a quizzical eyebrow, her mouth full of something.

“My father,” he says.

She swallows. “All right,” she says, her blue eyes large and trusting. She shouldn’t be trusting him. She shouldn’t.

He takes her hand and leads her through the crowds, catching his father’s eye as he does. Tywin offers him a tight smile and a dip of his head.

“Father,” says Jaime as they approach him. “Uncle,” he says to Kevan. “Uncle,” he says to Tyg.

_Ten words._

“Father, this is Brienne. My girlfriend. Tarth. Tarth! Brienne Tarth. My girlfriend.”

“Pleased to meet you,” says Brienne. She’s smiling, warmly, and her hand is out, between Jaime and his father.

“Girlfriend?” Tywin leaves her hand where it is, with a distasteful curl of his lip. “ _You_ have a girlfriend?”

Jaime tries to laugh. “Of course! What … did you think I was gay?”

“It had occurred to me, yes.”

Kevan and Tyg are gaping at the sheer size of Brienne. She towers over all three Lannister brothers.

“What do you do, Miss Tarth?” asks Tywin.

Brienne withdraws her hand. She looks uncertain. “I work in security.”

Uncle Tyg guffaws.

“For the Starks,” Jaime blurts. “She works for the Stark family.”

“The Starks!” Tywin snorts. “You don’t sound like a Northerner.”

“No, I’m from the Stormlands.”

“Ah, perhaps you know our guests the Tyrells then?”

“I don’t, no.”

“No,” says Tywin, looking at Brienne’s suit. “I don’t suppose you do.”

“I’ll introduce her!” Jaime says. “Why don’t I introduce her? I haven’t said hello myself yet.”

“Mmm,” says Tywin. “Perhaps you _should_.”

“Nice to meet you,” Brienne smiles, although it’s a bit more uncertain now. “You have a lovely home.”

“Yes,” says Tywin, but he’s looking at Jaime.

Jaime makes a face. “Come on, father. A bodyguard is better than a pole dancer, surely? And Tyrion gets a party!”

Tywin gives him a look of thinly-veiled contempt. “Get out of here. Go. Mingle with our guests, at least one of you should be pretending to care about the family reputation.”

Jaime smirks and takes Brienne’s hand. “Father,” he says. “Uncles. Enjoy your evening.”

He pulls her through the crowd again, feeling giddy with joy.

“That wasn’t too bad!” he says to Brienne. “That went well!”

She looks uncertain, to say the least, but Jaime is jubilant. He pulls her close and kisses her ecstatically. As he pulls away, it hits him – that was their first public kiss. He leans up for another, but she pulls back.

“You think that was going well?”

“Are you kidding? He was almost polite!”

“”A bodyguard is better than a pole dancer”?!”

Jaime grits his teeth. “Too much?”

“Do you always compare women in your family?”

Jaime snorts. “We’ve never had women to compare before.”

“Never?”

He shrugs. “Not at the same time.” Not ones they could talk about, anyway. Tyrion had a succession of women he paid for their company and Jaime … well, Jaime had Cersei.

Brienne is looking at him like he’s just dropped from the sky.

“Do you want to get out of here?” he asks her. “Get some food, get to bed?”

She’s still looking at him like she doesn’t know him, but nods nonetheless. He grins, widely, still not able to believe how lightly they got away with their Tywin encounter.

“Oh,” he remembers. “I have to say hello to the Tyrells, don’t I.”

“Who are the Tyrells?”

“New money,” Jaime says. Then shakes his head. “Father needs them to invest. He needs their money, and they need the Lannister prestige, so he’s courting them, or they’re courting us. I forget which.” He wrinkles his nose. “Not my side of the business.”

He nods over to where the Tyrells are gathered. “That’s Mace – he’s an old buffoon, father barely tolerates him. He likes to think he’s the head of the family, but see the old lady? That’s where the real power lies. Her and her granddaughter.”

“The pretty one?”

“Margaery, yeah. She’s as ambitious as hell, no doubt prodded by grandma. Father’s offered her a job, a very senior one. Cersei’s _furious_. She thinks Margaery is out to usurp her from the vice-presidency!”

“Cersei?”

Jaime’s heart stops. It had slipped out of his mouth. “Cersei …” he says. Half a hysterical laugh. “Yeah, Cersei. My - my sister. Did I not tell you her name?”

“I didn’t even know you had a sister.”

Sweat forms on his upper lip. “Oh. Didn’t you? Yeah … I do. She – she’s my twin.”

“Your _twin_?”

“Yeah, I … I thought I’d told you.” Always better to bluff.

“No.”

He forces out a laugh, but she has that incredulous expression on her face again. He supposes that normality would have dictated that he told Brienne he had a twin. “Sorry. Let’s go and say hi and then we can make our escape.” He holds out his hand.

Fortunately, she takes his hand and lets him lead her to the Tyrells. Mace is seated at a table, and for some reason, he has just burst into a loud, hearty song. He stands up to deliver a long last note in his rich baritone when he sees Jaime, then takes his hand in both of his.

“Mr Lannister the younger!” he exclaims. Behind him, his mother rolls her eyes.

“Mace,” says Jaime, as warmly as he can manage. “I hope you are all having a good time.”

“Wonderful, thank you. Your father knows how to throw an excellent party, I must say. Please be sure to compliment him on the shrimp vol-au-vents, won’t you.”

“I certainly will.”

Olenna Tyrell barges between Jaime and her son then, taking his hand from Mace’s with a flourish.

“Don’t tell us you are leaving just yet, young man?” she asks.

Jaime makes a show of looking regretful. “Unfortunately, my girlfriend has to catch a plane tomorrow.”

Not until tomorrow night, of course, but he doesn’t volunteer that information. He has very important plans to spend that time between Brienne’s legs.

“Yes,” says Olenna. “Your _girlfriend!_ A surprise to us all, I must say. I would have laid money on you batting for the same team as our Loras.”

Jaime laughs politely. How had he not realised everyone thought he was gay?

Olenna continues. “I’ve been watching her – isn’t she just marvellous!”

“Marvellous? Who – _Brienne_?” he asks, then realises that sounds less than charitable.

“Yes! Absolutely singular. I was rather hoping you would introduce us. Properly. As manners dictate?”

“Oh … uh … yes, of course. That’s why I came over. Olenna Tyrell, this is Brienne Tarth.”

Brienne steps forward, towering over the whole family. She takes Olenna’s hand and shakes it, firmly.

“I hear you work for the Starks,” Olenna says. “A bodyguard for their daughters?”

“I do,” says Brienne, looking a little puzzled.

Jaime is puzzled himself – he hasn’t told anyone here exactly what Brienne does for the Starks. Then, behind Olenna, he spots his father’s accountant, the hateful Petyr Baelish. Somehow, he’s always a man who knows everything. He grins at Jaime and raises his glass.

Olenna chuckles. “I daresay your job isn’t easy. My Margaery says they’re quite a handful those two.”

Brienne smiles, dropping her cute little soft chin. “They have fun. But they’re pretty good at doing as I say when it comes down to it.”

“They dare not refuse!” Olenna laughs, then turns back to Jaime. “Go on, then,” she says. “You’ve done your duty, you can go home now. Get this magnificent creature into your bed, you’re clearly dying to.”

Jaime laughs politely and bids the Tyrells goodnight. He waves goodbye across the room to Tyrion, who is being shouted at by Shae in a corner. He glares at Jaime.

But tonight, Jaime doesn’t care. He takes a firm hold of Brienne’s hand and leads her out into the freezing winter night, waving at The Hound to bring the car around for them.

“Okay?” he asks a shivering Brienne, rubbing her hands between his to warm them both.

She nods, and smiles at him.

“That could have been so much worse,” he grins. “I’m sorry my father’s such an arsehole.”

“Everyone seems pleased you’re not gay,” she smirks.

“There is always that.”

Brienne presses her lips together. Starts to speak, and then stops herself, as if she’s trying to rephrase in her head. “Did you …” she starts, tentatively. “Did you never take your ex to meet your family?”

This could be it, Jaime thinks. This could be his moment to tell her, to explain. But the words _Actually, my ex is my sister,_ die on his tongue. He finds himself shaking his head and helping her into the back of the car instead.

She’s gone quiet, though. Eyes a little sad. She takes a moment to respond when he kisses her, too, and he knows he won’t be able to get away with this much longer. She knows there’s something he’s holding back.

Next weekend, he promises himself. Next weekend he will talk to her, tell her everything. He just wants one more day and night of bliss. Innocent bliss.

Innocent seems to be far from her intentions, however. She pulls up the blind between them and The Hound, grabs Jaime by the tie and pulls him to her, tongue going straight in his mouth. He’s barely had time to squeak in surprise before he feels her unzip his trousers too.

He can’t hold back his moans as she strokes him, thrusting himself into her large, rough palm.

When he’s gasping, she starts to undo her own trousers, but he has to stop her.

“I didn’t bring any condoms, I’m an idiot.”

She huffs a frustrated breath, but bends to take him in her mouth instead, and then Jaime doesn’t give a fuck about anything.

She swirls that spot he showed her, the one on the underside of his cockhead, with the hard point of her tongue and he’s a whimpering blob. Head back on his neck, hips bucking up to her mouth, his legs splayed so she can shove a big hand in his fly and tug on his balls just how he likes it.

Gods, it’s obscene how much he loves this great big hulk of a woman.

He gets close, feeling his balls tighten in her hand, and then, torturously, she stops. Lifts her mouth away.

“What are you doing?” he groans.

“Don’t want to stain your suit,” she mumbles.

“What?! I’ve got loads of suits.”

“Don’t want to stain _my_ suit.”

“I’ll get it dry cleaned! Shit, Brienne …” her name is almost a whine – he _hurts_. “Please …”

She grins at him – her crooked teeth giving her an almost animal look in the low lights. He realises she’s teasing him. _Brienne_ is teasing him.

He growls and grabs her hair as she swallows his length once again, taking him right to the back of her huge mouth this time. The sensation is indescribable – he feels like she’s eating him alive. Her hand creeps up under his shirt to tug on his chest hair and that slight bite of pain takes him right over the edge.

He pulls her head away at the last second so he can spray his hot load over the lapels and shoulders of her cheapo suit. That will teach her to tease him.

“Jaime!” she complains, trying to brush at it and making it a whole lot worse.

He laughs, weakly, trying to get his breath back, trying to get the feeling back in his wobbly legs. “The Hound will take it to the dry cleaner,” he says.

She blushes a fierce shade of red. “Gods no!”

He tucks himself away, pleased to note that his own suit is surprisingly pristine.

“He’s handled worse than that, believe me. He’s had to dump overdosing hookers at the hospital for Tyrion before.”

Brienne looks horrified. Which is even more amusing when he notes she has a large blob of his come on her ear.

“I’m kidding,” he reassures her. He isn’t, of course. Tyrion has had some narrow squeaks. “But he will, don’t worry. Just fold it up, he doesn’t need to see what it is.”

“I think he’s going to guess.”

“What if he does? You gave me a blow job, Brienne. You’re my girlfriend. Accidents happen.”

“Accidents?”

“Mishaps. There’s a 24-hour dry cleaner down the road from me, he can have it back in an hour, I’ll tip him fifty dragons and you never have to look him in the eye again, all right?”

She still looks uncertain.

He sighs. “Don’t you do shit like this for the Stark girls?”

“No!”

“Come on … girls like that love blow jobs!”

“I don’t think you know many girls like them.”

He was mocking her, but she has a point. The only girl he knew at that age was Cersei.

He manages to straighten himself up as they pull into his building and takes Brienne’s jacket from her to spare her blushes.

The Hound holds the door open for them and takes the jacket without a word. That partition clearly isn’t soundproof at all.

“Thanks,” says Jaime with a smirk. “Brienne was a little clumsy with the uh … Caesar dressing.”

He can _feel_ Brienne’s face flaming behind him. It makes him smirk.

He leads her into the elevator and sees her looking at him, eyes narrow and her head slightly tilted.

“What?”

“Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Take pleasure from embarrassing people? Does it make you feel powerful to humiliate your staff like that? And me, too?”

Jaime opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He’s shocked to his core. “Humiliate you?”

“And your man. The Hound you call him? Is he just a dog to you? Does he not have a name?”

“Clegane. Uh, Sandor, maybe? I think. Everyone calls him The Hound.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know!”

The elevator stops. The doors open and Jaime digs out his keys. Lets them in to his apartment.

She’s still looking at him with distaste. “I wouldn’t work for you.”

“Why not? You take shit from the Starks all the time!”

“They would never speak to me like that. Nor send me out to get bodily fluids cleaned in the middle of the night.”

“Come on! Those two girls …”

“I’d die for those two girls. I can’t see your Hound stepping in front of a bullet for you.”

“He’s well paid, and he’s a _driver_. No one asked him to step in front of bullets.”

“It doesn’t mean you can speak to him like that, Jaime. Treat him like he’s there to amuse you.”

Jaime goes to argue, but it dies in his mouth. He takes his jacket off. Tucks his hair behind his ears.

“Is that how it comes across?” he asks, softly.

She looks confused. “How do you intend for it to come across?”

He shrugs. “Funny. I don’t know. Naughty maybe?” He looks at his shoes. “I don’t want it to bother you.”

“It bothers me. It’s unkind and … that’s not who you are. Not really.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that.

“Don’t act like a dick, you don’t need to. If you’d have been yourself that first night … in the club, I would have fallen in love with you right away.”

He feels his eyebrows shoot for the sky. In spite of himself, he smirks. “In love with me?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Are you in love with me, Brienne?”

She takes her shoes off, red and flustered.

“Gods, you _are_!” he grins a huge grin and laughs loudly.

She turns back to him, mouth contorted with indignance. “See? This is what I mean. I tell you I love you, something really personal and precious and a feeling I _know_ you return … and you _laugh_ at me?”

“Brienne …”

“No, you’re a dick, Jaime!”

“Brienne I’m not laughing at you! I’m … I’m _happy_! I didn’t think you’d ever say it.”

“You didn’t?”

“No! I’ve been wanting to say it for ages, since the first day we got it on.”

“That long?”

“Yeah,” he shrugs, feeling his own face get a little hot now. Not quite able to look her in the eye. “I knew pretty much straight away. Like a thunderbolt.”

“Oh.”

He reaches for her hand, takes it in both of his. “Come over here,” he urges, leading her into his living room, taking her over to the windows so her face is caressed by starlight, pale and perfect. He wants to remember this moment for the rest of his life.

He lifts his fingers to stroke her face, gazing into her wide blue eyes. His fingertips graze her cheekbone and move down over her wide, full mouth. She kisses his fingers gently as they pass. Forever and always.

“I love you, Brienne,” he says.

She smiles, wide enough to show her teeth, her beautiful eyes blinking far too much.

“I love you too,” she whispers.

He leans up to kiss her, his belly tying itself in an exquisite, soppy knot of joy as his lips touch hers. Her big, warm tongue slides into his mouth and he hears himself moan as he catches it with his own, wrapping her in his arms, tight and then tighter still.

The woman he loves. The woman who loves him.

They pull at each other’s clothes until they are naked and delicious before the huge window, skin sliding on skin sliding over the cold glass, Jaime watching the pulse and play of traffic over the curve of her hip as he falls to his knees in front of her to worship her with his tongue.

She arches against his mouth, her fingers squeaking on the window as she tries to grasp at it in her pleasure. One foot up on his shoulder, one hand in his hair.

Being in love seems to have made Brienne _loud_ , or maybe it’s given Jaime skills. But her cries ring out louder and louder as he suckles her clit, his beard rasping at her delicate flesh and her juices running copiously down his chin.

“I’m going to come,” she warns, and then Jaime’s world goes dark and hot and wetter still as her knees give way and she clasps his head hard between her thick warm thighs, her sex throbbing hard around him.

Gods but he could live here, right in this moment, crushed in the embrace of Brienne’s warm wet cunt, smothered by her thighs, listening to her ugly wails.

Sadly, he can’t actually breathe.

She slides down the window to collapse in a heap of massive limbs and flushed skin, Eyes closed, breathing ragged, thighs still quivering a little.

“Hey,” he says softly.

She opens her eyes.

“I love you, Brienne,” he tells her, just to say it again.

She grins a really goofy grin, which looks quite ridiculous on her bright red face. “I love you too, Jaime.”

He thinks he ought to pick her up now, carry her to bed swept up in his arms, but somehow he thinks the romance would be shattered if he didn’t manage to get her giant frame off the ground.

“Bed?” he asks instead, with a suggestive wave of his very hard cock.

She nods, and he pulls her to her feet, entwining their fingers as they go up the stairs to the mezzanine. They are kissing before they have got to the top and her hand is around his cock before they have crossed the floor to the bed.

She helps him with a condom and drags him down onto the bed, spreading her legs around his hips so he can take her, gathering her legs into the crooks of his elbows so he can take her _deep_. He locks eyes with her as he starts to thrust, tells her he loves her again. And again. And again, until she’s covering him with kisses and holding him hard against her. It feels so _good_ – not only the sex but just telling her how he feels, it’s like a huge relief.

Suddenly, he hears something downstairs. A rattle, a key in a lock. The deadbolt sliding open.

He pulls away from Brienne and she looks at him with wide eyes. Someone has unlocked the door. Someone …

His first thought is the Hound, bringing Brienne’s jacket back, but of course he doesn’t have a key. No one has a key.

No one except …

He flies out of bed. Holds up a hand to Brienne, telling her to stay. Pulls a pair of sweatpants on, very quickly, willing his cock to go down quick.

Races downstairs and round the corner.

She’s there. Standing in the hall. Hair loose, coat undone. A crimson skirt suit, black kitten heels. Eyes furious fire.

Cersei.

“What are you _doing_ here?” he hisses.

The first time he has seen her in a year.

“What were you _thinking_?” she screams at him. Absolutely raging. His heart sinks like a stone. There’s no way Brienne didn’t hear that.

“What was I _what_?”

“I just had a call from father’s accountant. Baelish. He says you took some woman to Tyrion’s party. Some great big monster who looks like a man?”

“Cersei …”

“A woman, though? What were you thinking?”

“What does it matter to you who I take where?”

“You’re _supposed_ to be gay, Jaime!”

“What?! I’m … _what?!”_

“How in all the hells did you think I managed to cover up for us all these years?”

“You told people I was gay?” He closes his eyes. Well, that explained a lot.

“Did you think you were going to make me jealous, Jaime? Baelish said she has a face like a horse! No, worse. Like she’d been kicked in the face _by_ a horse.”

That makes Jaime see red. He grabs Cersei without thinking, one-handed under her chin. Shoves her towards the door. “Keep your fucking voice down!”

“Why?” she asks, genuine puzzlement on her face. Then, she looks over his shoulder. “Oh,” she says. Her mouth falling open. “She … she’s _here?”_

Jaime follows her line of sight to see the pile of crumpled clothing on the floor by the window. There, on the glass above it, is a perfect imprint of Brienne’s arse. And her shoulders. And her hand.

“You’re really with her? You’re _actually_ fucking her?”

She looks at him with such raw, naked shock. Such horror. He sees it then, sees that she thought he still belonged to her, that he was still hers forever, no matter what she’d done.

She steps closer then, close enough he can feel the heat from her body through her clothes.

“Oh gods … you _are._ You stink of her cunt, Jaime.”

He tightens his grip on her throat, backing her up towards the door and shoving her against it, hard. Enveloped in that red mist that only Cersei, being in the presence of Cersei, brings on.

“Jaime?” a voice from behind him. A soft voice. A voice from another world.

Brienne – dressed in one of his t-shirts and a pair of his boxers. Her eyes blue and huge and wide.

He lets go of Cersei, realising abruptly that his sister’s feet weren’t touching the ground.

Cersei gasps for breath. Coughs her guts up. Rubbing at her throat.

Brienne is frozen. “What’s going on?” she says. “Is this …”

“It’s Cersei,” Jaime manages.

“I’m the mother of his children!” Cersei screams almost at the same time. “Look how he treats me!”

“Cersei?” Brienne looks at Jaime. Then at Cersei, then back at Jaime. Looking at them, _really_ looking at them, at how similar they look. “I thought you said Cersei was your sister?”

Jaime closes his eyes.

From the blackness behind his eyelids, Jaime hears Cersei laugh.

“He hasn’t told you, has he? He really hasn’t told you!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in getting this one written, all sorts of RL deadlines going on! I hope that it was worth the wait.
> 
> Special thanks are due as always to my fave, the brilliant and beautiful CaptainTarthister who has supported me with this and my RL project too. She needs some serious applause :)


	4. You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaime and Brienne deal with the aftermath of Cersei.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes ... I know I said this was going to be two chapters and it became four.
> 
> Now it's four but it needs to be five. I'm never very good at guessing how long stories will need. I promise that I won't keep you waiting for the next chapter long!

Brienne moves away. Sits down on the coffee table, her head in her hands while Jaime and Cersei scream at each other.

She’d tried to talk – no one had heard her. Then Cersei had slapped Jaime and Jaime had grabbed his sister by the hair and hadn’t let go. They’d wrestled and pulled at each other and yelled in each other’s faces and Brienne had just stared. Open-mouthed.

She feels numb.

Naked, too – she’s only in a pair of Jaime’s boxers and a white t-shirt of his that’s all-but transparent. Cersei already took the opportunity to mock her hairy thighs and tiny tits. Asked how Jaime could possibly get hard over such a “creature”. She’s sweaty and sticky and smells like unfinished sex.

The thought makes her feel sick. She needs the smell of Jaime off her. Now.

She goes upstairs, unnoticed, to Jaime’s vast bathroom. Gets in his gleaming walk-in shower, turns the water on. Too hard, too hot. Stands there in his boxers and his t-shirt.

She wants to cry. Every part of her seems to need it, but it isn’t coming out. Instead she’s shaking, head to toe. Hands clasped in front of her. Hair on her face.

She’s just witnessed a lovers’ spat without a doubt, she could see it in their bodies – the way Cersei pressed her curvaceous cleavage against Jaime – the way Jaime answered with his hips. There’s heat in it, knowledge of the other’s physicality. In another situation the fighting could have turned to fucking.

But Gods – there was something _so_ siblingy about it, too. Name-calling. Hair-pulling. Brienne had felt like she was a toy being fought over.

Gods. Jaime – and _his sister_?

She’s going to be sick.

Dashes out of the shower, slipping on the tiles, getting to his bespoke marble toilet just in time. Her stomach heaves – heaves again. Up comes the shrimp vol-au-vents, the satay shish sticks. The caviar blini and the exquisite avocado crostini from the party.

She wipes her mouth with Jaime’s extra-thick luxury toilet paper and flushes. Sits there for a while on the cold marble floor, hugging her knees to her chest, wondering if she’s going to be sick again or just cry.

Neither happens, so she goes to his huge marble sink to find her toothbrush, bright green plastic next to his artisan bamboo one and scrubs her teeth with his crystal white SLS-free toothpaste that she knows is eighty dragons a tube. Squeezes more out and scrubs again until her gums bleed.

Turns back to go back to the shower.

Jaime’s there.

He’s in the bath.

Not a bath – it’s a jacuzzi thing, sunken into the floor, big enough to fit eight people in. Jaime’s in there looking small and lost, just his head and shoulders sticking out of the bubbling water. He looks up at Brienne with fevered eyes through his long hair.

He has a cut on his cheek from where Cersei slapped him – she’d had a lot of very flashy rings on her fingers. It’s dripping blood into the water.

Neither of them move. Neither of them speak.

Brienne’s stomach feels like lead.

“I thought you’d gone,” he says at last.

She shakes her head. How would she have gone? He and Cersei were fighting right by the front door.

“Are you?” he asks. “Going?”

She swallows. Her mouth is dry. Dead. A desert.

“Do I have it right?” she says. Her voice surprisingly strong. “Your ex. The mother of your children. The one you nearly killed yourself over.”

“Yes,” Jaime says.

“She’s your sister?”

“Yes,” Jaime says again.

“And she’s your blood sister? Not a stepsister, not adopted, not just someone you call your sister?”

“She’s my twin.”

“Your twin. You had sex with your twin sister? A relationship with your twin sister? Children …”

“Yes.”

“That’s …” She can’t find the words. _Disgusting? Shocking? An abomination_? Maybe there aren’t words.

“I know.”

“For how long?”

Jaime shrugs his shoulders weakly. “For always. Since we were children together at Casterly Rock.”

Brienne shudders again. Dripping all over the floor. She can’t stop shuddering. She starts to speak several times, but can’t make words come out of her throat.

“Would you have told me?” she says eventually. “Ever?”

He nods, vigorously. “I was building up to it.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. When the time was right. When I thought … you would … understand.”

All of Brienne’s breath leaves her body is one long, long gust. “Under – _understand_?! You fucked your sister!”

Jaime looks away.

“Not just fucked. _Loved_. Made children with. When was I supposed to be able to understand that?”

“Go,” he says.

“What?”

“I don’t blame you. I’ll get the Hound, I’ll pay for your plane ticket. You can go back to Winterfell.”

“Oh fuck Winterfell!”

He blinks. “Fuck Winterfell?”

She looks him in the eye. Sets her jaw. Steps into the bath with him, at the other end. Sits down in the foaming water. Still in her clothes.

He watches her with terrified eyes, shrinking away from her like a hunted animal.

 “I told you I loved you tonight,” she says. “I’m not going to fly back home like that never happened.”

“But – “

“No!” she shouts. Her voice echoes off the black marble walls, startling even her. “You owe me this piece of you, Jaime. You _owe_ me.”

His mouth is open in shock.

“I’ve never told anyone that I love them before, not _anyone._ I’ve never trusted anyone, never relied on them, never been wanted by anyone for more than a joke or because bloody Dr Bronn told them I should be desperate because I’m the ugliest woman alive. A great lumbering beast. And I gave myself to you happily despite all the shit I’ve had to take in my life from men like you.”

He hangs his head.

“I don’t know if that means anything, if we have a future or if it was all a waste. But you’re going to talk to me, Jaime. You’re going to give me something that you’ve never given anyone else too. I want to know about you and Cersei.”

When his eyes meet hers again, they are frightened. But they hold hers, burning. He nods, short and firm.

She nods back. “You were children when it began? At Casterly Rock?”

He clears his throat. Wipes the blood from his cheek and the tears from his eyes. “It’s a family story,” he says then, his voice a hiss of a whisper. “That when I was born, I was holding Cersei’s foot.”

Brienne watches as a fresh tear rolls down his face.

“You see? It was destiny. I wanted to be with her before I took my first breath.” He sighs and looks back at her, the pain on his face a palpable thing. “I don’t remember a moment of my life where I didn’t want to be with her.”

Then he looks away, his jaw tight.

“We were together. Always, as children. We had to be – we didn’t have friends, or school or …”

“No school?” Brienne interrupts.

Jaime shakes his head. “We had tutors. At the Rock. Maybe Father thought someone would kidnap us if we were at school, demand a ransom? I don’t know. Mother left after Tyrion was born … he was eight years younger, so it was just the two of us. Father wasn’t there. Tyrion was a baby … “

“No one looked after you?”

Jaime shrugs. “There were adults in the house. Housekeepers. Chefs. Tyrion had a nanny. Maybe she was our nanny, too? But I don’t remember her. Not even what she looked like, so I don’t suppose she did a very good job.”

Brienne swallows.

“Cersei and I were inseparably close. We used to dress in each other’s clothes, pretend to be each other at lessons. We ate the same food, slept in the same bed, played the same games …”

He looks at her, conflicted. Like he doesn’t know how to put this.

“Things got … intimate … very young. Like I said, just games really. You saw the Rock, it’s huge. We could go all day without seeing any of the staff. Sometimes we’d put movies on in a wing no one had been in for a while. Not kids’ movies. Not porn but … adult movies. You know? Then we’d act out all the love scenes. The kissing and the hugging.”

He sighs.

“You have to realise … we were touch starved. That’s what Dr Bronn called it. He said we were probably drawn together because we never had affection as children. Kissing and hugging weren’t a part of our lives. So … sneaking off, putting our arms around each other … it felt like something we’d discovered, just the two of us.”

He clenches his jaw even tighter.

“But yeah, we’d take our clothes off and act out the sex scenes as well. As we got older, _that_ part got more frequent. And a lot more intense. Like any kids, any teens … discovering your body, learning to jerk off, all that stuff. Everybody does it. I just … did all that with my sister.”

He leans his head back on the wall of the tub.

“You know, I don’t even remember the first time we actually fucked. There must have been a first time, but it doesn’t feel like it. We were certainly doing it with some regularity by the time we were … fourteen? Fifteen? I know that’s fucked up. I knew it then, too.”

“Then why did you do it?”

Jaime shrugs. It’s the weariest shrug she’s ever seen. “Felt good,” he says. Then “It didn’t feel like a choice.”

“She liked it, too?”

“I didn’t abuse her. That’s not what this was.”

“What was it?”

He sighs. Wearily. “Love.”

That word hurts Brienne. Sinks into her chest like a knife, cold and sharp. Something hysterical threatens to bubble out of her mouth as laughter. He loved her. He _loved his sister_.

He’s looking at her carefully. “You can laugh at that if you want. Or sneer, it doesn’t matter. I knew what everybody would think if they knew. What we’d get. Shock. Ostracism. It could ruin Father, ruin the business, change everything for the whole family if it came out.”

“You didn’t care?”

“Care? I had Cersei. She’s the only thing I ever cared about.”

He lets out a laugh himself then, hollow and mocking.

“We _liked_ it. All our lives, everything we saw, everything we did, everything we interacted with was owned by Father. Father’s word was more powerful than the Gods’! But we had something he didn’t know about. And if he didn’t know about it, he couldn’t stop us, couldn’t control us, couldn’t separate us. We had the power to burn Tywin Lannister to the ground and he had absolutely no fucking idea.”

There is a grin on Jaime’s face now, a crazed one.

“That feeling, that power … it added to the whole sense of destiny that we had. That we were the only two people in the world that mattered. I can’t tell you how intoxicating that was.”

Brienne feels sick again.

“Maybe it should have stopped when we grew up. I think Cersei expected it to. She met a man, she married him – not someone she loved, a business associate of Father’s of course. She hoped she’d see the world with him – he just wanted her to stay at home and have children.”

He chuckles.

“She did – they just weren’t _his_ children.”

Brienne’s skin crawls. She can see the sharp pride in his face at this admission. The fact that he had cuckolded a man with his own sister. Conceived children from incest out of spite. But then he gets sad again. Eyes on the water.

“Thirty-five years,” he says. “Thirty-five years I loved Cersei. Exclusively Cersei. Lived, breathed, would have died … for Cersei. I couldn’t look at a sunset without thinking of her, not a tree or a flower or a painting, a piece of music … everything beautiful in the world was beautiful because I loved Cersei.”

He lets out a long, long breath, his eyes closed against the memory.

“But Cersei is a lying whore.”

He opens his eyes again, and this time, they _burn._

“Those were Tyrion’s exact words. We had an argument one day, my brother and me. About an ex-girlfriend of his that Father had disapproved of. It was nothing – just a disagreement. But Tyrion accused me of being judgemental back then and taking Father’s side and I admitted that Father had coaxed me into telling Tyrion a lie about this girl. It was ancient history, I thought.”

Jaime stops for a moment, his brow furrowing deeply.

“Tyrion was _furious_. Called me every name under the sun – I’d never seen him so angry, certainly not with me. He called me blind fool and he – he said that Cersei was a lying whore.”

Jaime shudders.

“He told me she’d been fucking our cousin. And one of Robert’s bodyguards. Maybe the pool boy for all he knew.”

He shakes his head.

“More than brother and sister – we shared a womb. One soul in two bodies. When I was inside her, she felt whole. We were born together, and we’d die together. Just … bullshit. All of it. Every good thing I thought I had in my life.”

He looks, for a moment, like he is about to cry.

“It _wasn’t_ good, though,” he says then, his voice strangled. “It wasn’t love, it wasn’t a relationship, we didn’t make each other happy. Never. I know that now. It was always … what you saw downstairs. That or sex.”

A tear rolls down his face, mixing with the crusting blood of the cut on his cheek.

“I don’t want to be that man, Brienne. I don’t want to be a crazy man, jealous and reckless and fighting. She – “

He shakes his head, angry at himself.   
  
“She doesn’t make me do it. I don’t mean that. When we’re together, we fall into … she’s ... I’m … someone I don’t want to be.”

“Who _do_ you want to be, Jaime?”

He looks at her, wide-eyed. As if she’s just asked the most obvious question in the world. “I want to be the man I am for you. The man who deserves a kiss on the head when he gets a plate of toast. The one who got you off for the first time during sex, the first man you ever told you love. I want to be the man who gets to bed the Unbeddable Hulk.”

“Jaime …”

“Do you still love me?” he asks softly.

It’s a plea rather than a question. Childlike, needy. But it makes sense, just as so much about Jaime makes sense to Brienne after hearing about his childhood.

“Yes, I still love you,” she whispers.

He lets out a breath that sounds like half a sob. Squeezes his eyes shut tight.

“But I won’t lie,” she says. “It’s going to take some time.”

He nods, his eyes still shut tight. “I know.”

“It’s … it’s a _weird_ thing, Jaime. A hard thing to process. How … _how_ do I make sense of it?”

“I don’t know,” he murmurs. Looking at his hands beneath the water. “I’m still struggling with that part myself.”

“What’s it going to be like, being in a relationship now? Knowing that you did what you did with your sister, that your niece and nephews are your children? Is that going to be hard to live with?”

“I don’t know,” he says again.

“Am I just going to look like an idiot, too? One of those women who thinks she can change a man?”

“You _have_ changed me.”

“And Cersei …”

“Don’t worry about Cersei.”

“How can I not? You took me to a party tonight. We were there less than an hour … and she turns up here, screaming abuse. That’s pretty … _intense_ , Jaime.”

“She didn’t know you were here. She thought I’d taken a fake date to make her jealous.”

“Someone at the party told her, right?”

“Yeah, Petyr fucking Baelish. Father’s accountant. He’s like a professional shit-stirrer.”

“So this Baelish knows about you and Cersei.”

Jaime looks uncomfortable. And also, oddly, as though that hadn’t occurred to him before now. “I suppose he must.”

“Who else? Does everyone know?”

“No! Not that I know of, certainly no one with any evidence. Unless Robert asks Cersei for a DNA test on the kids there isn’t any.”

“How do you know that won’t happen? It doesn’t sound as though you’ve been as discreet as you think.”

He looks down. “Maybe not.”

“If it comes out …”

He shrugs nonchalantly. “Don’t worry about that either. If it comes out, it will mostly hurt Father. A bit. He’d be livid about the press coverage. The business a bit too, probably, a scandal is never good for the stock market stuff. Cersei has the most to lose, by far. Her marriage is shit, but … Robert has a seriously good pre-nup, she’d be fucked for money. For sure it would hurt her more than it hurts me.”

“What about your children? Finding out their parents are brother and sister?”

Jaime mulls that over, licking his bottom lip. Biting it with his teeth. “Yeah,” he admits. “That wouldn’t be great, would it.”

There is a _lot_ of this he’s never really thought about, she realises. “No, it wouldn’t, Jaime. That’s the kind of thing that would put them into therapy for the rest of their lives.”

He scratches his beard. “Yeah.”

“Something else, too.”

“What?”

“The violence.”

“What violence?”

“When I came downstairs, you were _strangling_ your sister. That violence.”

He winces. “I lost control. I know that’s not great.”

“No shit.”

“That _worries_ you? It worries _you?_ ”

“Being in a relationship with a man who strangles his significant other during a fight? Of course that worries me.”

He snorts. “Honestly? You’ve got two inches on me, and you’re a professional bodyguard – don’t you think you’d just break my arm?”

“You think I want to be with someone who is capable of that in the first place? Or what if I piss you off when I’m tired, or sick, or … pregnant or something?”

“Pregnant?” His eyebrows shoot for the ceiling.

“ _Hypothetically_. You’ve never been angry at me before, Jaime. Is that what you’re like when you’re angry?”

“No!” he says. “Brienne, come on. It was a … an extreme situation tonight. I was shitting myself over the whole party thing anyway, and I haven’t seen Cersei for a year and she … she _bursts_ in right as we’re making love and tells you flat out that I fucked her! It was just about my worst nightmare.”

He sighs.

“In that moment … yeah I did want to absolutely fucking kill her. And yeah, I know there’s no way I can reassure you that I’m not some violent wife-beater type, other than to promise you that I’m not, and hope that I can demonstrate it in the weeks, and months and hopefully, years to come.”

She doesn’t say anything. It feels like the room is spinning.

“You have to believe me,” he says softly.

“I’m going to need some time,” she says. “I can’t … I can’t just continue like nothing has happened, Jaime.”

“I don’t expect you to.”

“What did you expect? What did you think would happen if I found out?”

He takes a long, long time to answer. “I didn’t know. I never told anyone before,” he says eventually. “Brienne I _love_ you. I love you so much, I can’t lose you, not now, not because of this …”

She feels more vomit coming up again and she holds up a hand, hard.

“Jaime, stop. Please.”

He bites his lip. “I want to be with you,” he says in a small voice.

She looks away, closing her eyes.

“I don’t want to be part of this any more, Brienne. I want to be with you.”

“You _are_ with _– “_

“No,” he interrupts. “I _only_ want to be with you. I don’t want _this_ any more, all the weird Lannister shit. You’re right – I don’t want to go to a party and get informed on and spied on and then have Cersei bursting in being as crazy as shit. What kind of life is that?”

He sighs.

“It’s been so nice. Just … being in your apartment with you every weekend, just fucking and chatting and eating and just being normal with you. It’s been like having a life of my own.”

“You have a life of your own. Look at this place! And you have your job …”

“My Father owns this place. And my job? Father doesn’t trust me to _do_ my job. He does what he’s always done – tells me how it’s all going to be mine one day and then berates me for being a disappointment to him. I’m lucky if I get trusted with a spreadsheet.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t enjoy it, I don’t get anything out of it. I’m not even good at it. When I do get one of those spreadsheets, I’m up all night just trying to read it. I don’t even _read_ well. And writing? My secretary – cousin Alton – he writes all my reports for me.”

He closes his eyes. Swallows, deeply, and then opens them again.

“I’ve spent most of my life feeling like the stupidest fraud. All this …” he gestures at the beauty of their surroundings. “I’m the person who deserves it least. Father would be better off passing his empire on to Tyrion. Even Cersei.”

Brienne doesn’t know what to say.

“I don’t want it any more, Brienne. I just want _you_.”

She closes her eyes, lets out a deep sigh of a breath.

“Jaime,” she starts. “Don’t you see what you’re saying? Don’t you see the pattern of this?”

“What?”

“You just told me … you gave up your whole life for Cersei and it destroyed you – without her you were just an abysmal mess, right?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ve known each other three months … and now you want to give up your whole life for me?”

“No, I didn’t mean that.”

“Listen to yourself. You don’t want your job, you don’t want your family, you don’t want your apartment? What … you’re going to move up to Winterfell, move in with me?”

“Why not?”

“Because we’ve known each other _three months_. What if it doesn’t work out? We’ve spent 90% of the time we’ve been together just … fucking. We don’t know each other at all.”

“Yes, we do.”

“No, we don’t. And what would you do if it doesn’t work out? Go on another year-long bender until you find another woman to cling to?”

He looks angry, then. Hurt. “I’m not clinging to you, Brienne. I’m in love with you. I thought you were in love with me too.”

“This … Jaime … this is too much.”

“Is it? Isn’t that the best part of being in love? That feeling of being too much? Truly believing you belong to someone, that all your destinies have been fulfilled? When I’m gazing into your astonishing eyes, when I’m making love to you, that’s how I feel, Brienne. Like I want to be with you until I die in your arms surrounded by our ten kids. I know objectively that it may not work out, that marriage and children and all of that is probably _way_ off into the future even if you want it … but that’s what I love about being in love.”

She doesn’t know what to say. She’s dizzy, overwhelmed.

His eyes don’t leave hers. “Please don’t tell me that feeling is wrong.”

He leans toward her, reaching out of the water with his right hand. The hand that was broken outside the club that first night, the hand that had gripped hers while he introduced her to his father. The hand he slides between her thighs to make her wet.

Brienne’s head spins. It’s far too much – for a moment she thinks she may faint, and she staggers up to get out of the bath. The heat and the steam and her raw, empty stomach hit her like a slap, and she feels her knees buckle beneath her.

Then he’s beside her with a splash of water, grabbing her arms, catching her, holding her. Making sure she doesn’t hit her head on the side of the bath. His arms are hot from the bath, wet and steaming, but he feels and smells like Jaime. Her Jaime, so gentle. _Gentler than he was with Cersei_ , she thinks, and she kisses him.

He kisses her, too. Feverishly, furiously. His breath hissing from his nose as it’s pressed against her cheek. His fingers digging into her wet hair.

“I want to be with you, Brienne,” he pants into her neck between kisses. “Gods I just want to be with you.”

Then she is on her back, on the tiles by the side of the bath with him on top of her, both of them dripping wet and dizzy with want. Both gasping and grasping each other’s skin, clawing at hands and faces and bodies.

Gods, she wants to be with him, too. She wants him with every cell of her body – her blood is fierce with her desire for him. She wants him everywhere, she wants his skin under her hands, his tongue in her cunt, his hot breath all over her wet body.

She can’t think … she can’t think. He’s on top and her legs are apart around his hips, ankles crossed over his arse as he thrusts against her, again and again and again, his bare cock rasping the wet boxer shorts she wears. And oh, the pressure is _right_ on her clit. Pressing and rubbing, pressing and rubbing, panting and whimpering together. Her mouth locked with his, not knowing where her tongue ends and his begins.

_One soul in two bodies._

_Cersei …_

Brienne pushes the thought hard out of her mind as he slides his mouth down to her breast. She thinks he will lift the soaked, transparent t-shirt out of the way, but he doesn’t. He latches on to her nipple and sucks it through the fabric, drinking the water from it like milk. Grunting and arching hard against her. Brienne hears herself groan.

She lifts her hips to get the sodden boxers off and then his mouth is buried between her legs. Tongue hot and hard against her painfully aroused clit and she’s hit with a wash of pleasure so hard she trembles violently. Fists his wet hair. He laps at her again and again and again, left hand spread flat on her belly and the right digging into the wet meat of her thigh.

“I’m going to come!” she blurts, almost a shriek. Gods, he’s got so much better at this! Gods, he knows her body, knows every single infinitesimal part of her cunt and what to do with it.

The pleasure is bright and hard when it comes, so hard she screws up her face and bangs her head on the tiles as she writhes against his mouth. Wailing.

Then he’s back to her lips, the taste of her cunt rich and shocking on his tongue, and his cock – ohhhh his cock – sandwiched hot and hard between their bellies.

She wants him inside her. Now. Pushes down on his hips and angles her own upward.

_When I was inside her, she felt whole._

_Cersei Cersei Cersei …_

He fists his cock and shoves it inside her, not gently. They cry out together at the sensation, eyes wide on each other’s eyes as they belatedly realise it’s the first time they have fucked without a condom.

Brienne takes moon pills, so there’s no danger of a pregnancy, but there’s a terrifying level of trust to taking him inside her body naked like this, a level of commitment she’s not sure is appropriate right now.

Jaime closes his eyes and his throat moves under his skin as he swallows. She knows that look - his teeth are clamped tightly together, his nostrils slightly flared. _He’s trying not to come_ , she realises. _Already_. He’s trying to think of something else.

She pushes him out of her and rolls them both over, so that he is the one on his back now, his long hair fanned out on the bathroom floor like a mane. Straddles him. Takes him back inside her with a grunt. Then she bends over him and grinds her hips deliberately, with a purposeful rhythm that she knows is his favourite – hard and slow, hard and slow, building to quicker, quicker, eyes locked with his, breath coming rapidly.

_We were born together and we’ll die together._

_Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei …_

He groans helplessly. “Wait …”

“No,” she whispers.

“Please,” he begs. “I’m going to …”

And he does. She watches his face, his unguarded face, every contortion and stretch of every muscle as it forms into an expression of exquisite pleasure. His hands grasp tight to her hips, stilling them, and his cock presses inside her, deep, throbbing, naked, filling her with his seed.

He’s so beautiful, this man with the ugliest secret. The ugliest life, the ugliest pain.

_Cersei …_

How is giving this man pleasure the most beautiful thing she’s ever done?

His eyes are closed. His head tipped back. Mouth slightly open, moaning softly as his spent cock twitches inside her.

Brienne gets up. His seed runs down her wet thighs. Drips onto the black marble floor.

And then, finally, the tears start.

They start with a moan, deep in her chest, her heart thudding hard in her ribcage beneath. Thudding with the rhythm of

_Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei Cersei_

Her throat is strangling her – she can’t even sob. Her eyes burn, tears swollen and stinging.

She sits down with a fat wet slap on the floor, limbs too weak to support her, all the air going from her body in an anguished, trembling gasp.

Jaime opens his eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

Brienne shakes her head.

“Wha – what’s the matter?”

She opens her mouth to reply, but a sob comes out. A deep one, wracking her body and turning her face into a crumpled mess.

He reaches for her but she pulls away this time, pulls away from him, even though wet, tousle-haired and golden with a post-sex glow, he looks like half a god.

His hand dies in the space between them, falls to the floor beside him. He watches helplessly as she sobs and sobs again. Covering her face in her hands, shuddering and gasping and soaking her cheeks with hot tears.

She feels like she’s breaking. Literally breaking – like her limbs will fall off, their bones shattered and twisted and cracked. Like her ribcage will explode outwards with the force of her heaving lungs inside. Like the pressure of her own hands on her face will bite lumps from her cheeks.

“Please …” she pants. “I think … I think I just need to go home.”

“Home?” he asks, his voice soft and full of fear.

“I can’t do this. I don’t think I can do this.”

“What?”

“I need to go home. Please. I’ll … call a cab. The airline might exchange my ticket.”

“Brienne, you can’t! We … we just …”

“I know.”

“Then what …”

She holds up a hand, feeling sick at the thought of what they had just done, hearing nothing but the name of his sister in her head.

“I _need_ to go home!” she repeats, more forcefully.

“Now? Tonight?”

“I need some time.”

He nods. Eyes wide. “Of course. I’ll … I’ll call the Hound. You don’t need a cab.”

He drags himself up and grabs a towel, padding off to the bedroom in search of his phone.

Brienne hugs her knees for a long, long time. Looking sadly through the open door, at the rumpled bed and discarded condom where they had been fucking when Cersei had arrived. Where they had held each other, looked into each other’s eyes. Where she had truly, truly, let herself love for the first time.

It hurts to think about that. It hurts so much.

She gets up and towels herself dry, digs out fresh jeans and a sweater from her suitcase. Pulls them on. That hurts too – her skin feels bruised and vulnerable and cold and naked.

She collects her things, stuffs them all in her suitcase, not caring about folding or packing neatly.

Jaime comes upstairs, dressed in his sweatpants again, his long hair dripping on his shoulders. He looks at her as if he’s frightened.

“The Hound is on his way,” he says quietly. “He has your jacket, too.”

“Thank you,” she says.

He doesn’t move. Just watches her. Watches as she picks up her hairbrush and her hairgel from the dresser. Watches as she leaves behind the watch he bought her.

“Is it over?” he asks.

“Please don’t,” she says.

“I need to know.”

“I don’t know,” she replies. “I’m sorry, I thought I could … I thought we could talk and … understand … and … be in love and that would be … enough. I wanted it to be enough. But I can’t … I need some time. I just can’t.”

“Okay,” he says gently. “I understand. Can I call you? Tomorrow?”

“Please don’t.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.”

“Brienne, I ….”

“I can’t.”

Just then his apartment buzzer goes.

He steps in front of the stairs. Blocking her way. “Don’t go like this. Please. What if I come to the airport with you? We could – talk on the way?”

“I think we’ve talked enough. I just need to go home now.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too. But it hurts too much right now.”

He steps aside. She lifts her suitcase. Carries it down the stairs. Walks towards the front door.

“Goodbye, Brienne,” he says softly.

She looks back at him, her eyes full and her chin wobbling, but she doesn’t say goodbye back.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I promised at the top, chapter 5 will be along very soon I promise.
> 
> Want to thank the wonderful, wonderful CaptainTarthister for her help with this chapter. I don't mind admitting it's been an utter bastard to get right and she has been with me every step of the way, giving me the best fresh eyes in the world, listening to my worries and helping me plot every point out. It would be a hideous mess if it wasn't for her. She's my best gurl.


	5. I Want the Big One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One year later ...

“Your phone is ringing.”

Tyrion, out of breath and clearly hungover, grabs Jaime’s arm as he steps out of the planning office into the brilliant light and heat of the Lorathi sunshine. It’s only a little after 9 and already it’s hotter than the hottest day he ever felt in Westeros. Even the height of summer in Dorne doesn’t compare to this. He’s melting.

Instinctively, he pats himself down, trying to find which pocket he’s stashed his phone. He finds it in the butt pocket of his jeans, and pulls it out. It’s not ringing. He looks quizzically at Tyrion.

“ _Your_ phone,” he says. “In your RV.”

His personal phone. He barely uses that these days, only as an alarm to get him out of bed in the mornings. It’s there where he left it on the bedside table.

He claps Tyrion on the back and thanks him, setting off at a jog across the site to where the crew’s trailers and RVs are.

He passes Shae as she’s coming out of hers and Tyrion’s, dressed in a diaphanous sundress and with a beautiful smile on her face. She looks perfectly at home in this climate – as of course she is. They greet each other with a wave.

He can hear his phone already, and he knows that ringtone. It almost freezes him where he stands despite the blistering heat.

He fumbles with his keys, charges inside. Crashes through the paper-thin door to the sleeping area, dives over the bed.

There she is.

Her picture.

Her face. Her wide blue eyes and full lips. Her freckles. Winter sunshine in her untidy mat of hair. He’d taken that picture one weekend in her apartment between long, lingering kisses, when they’d been wrapped about each other naked. When he’d been lost in her. Lost and besotted.

He answers the call.

“Brienne?” he says. His voice is small and terrified. Just in case it isn’t her at all. In case it’s a phone glitch, or a butt dial, or his imagination playing tricks. A sudden gust of wind blows his trailer door shut with a bang.

“Hello Jaime,” she says, softly.

It’s her. It’s really her.

He sits down on the bed.

“How – how are you? It’s been … what … almost a year?”

“Yeah,” she sighs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be out of contact so long, I …”

“I understand,” he says.

He does. He really does. It’s why he hadn’t contacted her, either, even though he itched to, he _hurt_ to, sitting with his phone in his hand sometimes, desperate to hear her, desperate to speak to her.

She lets out a long breath, almost a sigh. It overloads the mic on her phone and it sounds like a rumble, a landslide almost.

“I was wondering,” she says softly. “If you’d like to get together sometime. Just to talk. About things. Again.”

“Yes!” he cries. Then realises that was too enthusiastic. Way, way too enthusiastic. “Yeah, I could do that. If you want to.”

“I want to.”

Jaime has to bite his lip to stop himself cheering. Gods he has to play this carefully. So, so carefully.

“Okay,” she says. And he thinks he hears something of a smile in her voice. Maybe. “I’m still in Winterfell. Still working for the Starks. Still in the same apartment. Would you … maybe like to come up for the weekend? Like we used to.”

Jaime’s heart leaps. He looks around himself for a second, frantically trying to remember where he left his suitcase. Then he remembers.

“I can’t,” he tells her. “Shit, I’m so sorry, Brienne. I’m not even in Westeros right now.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah … I’m in Lorath. For the next three months. Gods … so much has changed.”

“Lorath?” she asks.

“It’s a long story. But … right after what happened with us, I … well, I won’t lie. It hit me really hard. I’m – I’m sure it hit you hard too.”

“Yeah.”

“I couldn’t go back to … everything. I just couldn’t. Everything just fell apart a bit.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No! No, please don’t be sorry. It fell apart in a good way. Not like in a self-destructive binge way like it did with … before.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah, it was. I left my job. My apartment. I moved in with Tyrion and Shae for a while. Got to know Shae really well.” He chuckles. “For a gold-digging whore, she’s actually awesome.”

Brienne laughs at that, which tugs Jaime’s heartstrings. Gods, he’s missed her laugh.

“We got to talking a lot, and I told her some things I only ever told you. Not … not … you know … _that_ , but I told her about my job, and about Cousin Alton having to help me with my reports.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. And uh … she asked me if I’d ever considered that I might be dyslexic.”

“Dyslexic?”

“Shae has a sister with it, she said what I’d described reminded her of her sister. She suggested I look into it, so I did.”

He takes a breath. Trying to describe this … words can’t do it justice.

“And?” she asks.

“And … wow … it was me. It was my problems. Right there, staring me in the face. It was like seeing myself for the first time.”

“Oh, Jaime!”

The happiness in her voice, that little burst of joy! It makes his heart leap. He’s sure she must be able to hear his heart thumping in his chest right now.

“It changed everything. I got myself a diagnosis, started to understand it, put things in place to support myself. Cut myself some slack here and there. Shae hooked me up with the guy her sister got support from, he’s a doctor who specialises in late diagnosed dyslexics.”

“In Lorath?”

“He’s Westerosi, but he travels. I got to know him – Sam Tarly, he’s a good guy. He’s been trying to get this project off the ground – a school basically, teaching dyslexic adults how to deal with their diagnosis, how to navigate the system, how to use aids and adaptations in their everyday lives. To cut a long story short – there was me with my trust fund and now … Tyrion and Shae and I … we’re out here building a school!”

“That’s why you’re there? You’re doing it now?”

“Yeah! I know, it’s crazy.”

“It’s amazing!”

“Thanks.”

She goes quiet for a moment, only the sound of her breath on the speaker letting Jaime know she’s still there.

“You sound so happy,” she says at last.

He takes a moment to answer. “Yeah. I am.”

“I’m happy for you.”

She does sound happy for him. She does. But there’s a tinge of something else to her voice, too. Something gloomy.

“You must be very busy,” she says then. “I won’t keep you.”

“No!” he says. More forcefully than he had intended. “No. You’re not. You’re not. I’m happy to hear from you. Really happy.”

“That’s good. Maybe … when your school is built, if you’re back in Westeros … if you want to … call me?”

“I will. Of course I will!”

He bites his tongue, hard. Stopping himself from blurting things out, stupid things about how madly in love with her he still is, about how he thinks of her hairy thighs when he jerks off, how he still cries like a baby sometimes when he thinks about what happened between them.

Instead he says “Brienne?”

“Yes?”

“I’m grateful, but … it’s been a year. You stayed well away. Why call now?”

She lets out another gust of breath at her phone’s mic, and swallows audibly. Chuckles a little bit, almost ruefully. “I dreamed of you,” she says.

“You did?” That takes him by surprise. And as he always does when he’s surprised, he makes a joke of it. “I hope I pleasured you well in your dream!”

She laughs. “No! Not a dream like that. I dreamed I was in a fight. In a club somewhere, trying to keep Sansa and Arya out of trouble. I dream that quite a lot, as you can imagine!”

“Yeah.”

“But this time, you were fighting with me.”

He almost laughs again. He doesn’t have the first clue how to fight – he’s had bodyguards to do that for him all his life. But he likes the thought – it speaks to him somehow. At her side, working together to take down bad guys – moving with her, close to her and apart again, maybe back-to-back like they’re in a martial arts movie. Close enough to feel the sweat and the muscle of her.

Like sex, he thinks. Fighting at her side would feel like sex.

He gets it.

“That’s cool,” he says softly. Carefully. “That sounds like a … fun dream.”

“Naked,” she says.

“We were fighting naked?!”

“Yeah. Fighting your father and his brothers and all the people we met at Tyrion’s party. Cersei, too.”

“Oh.” He doesn’t know what to say to that.

“Just us. Our bare hands. But … together.”

“Together,” he repeats, his voice barely more than a breath. Together is a thought he hasn’t allowed himself to think for a _long_ time. It’s a thought that’s hurt him whenever he’s had it.

She lets out a long sigh. Starts to speak a couple of times but stops herself. Tuts impatiently at herself. “Anyway, I don’t know what I wanted from this,” she says. “Maybe just to hear your voice.”

“It’s good to hear yours.”

“Maybe I’ll call again?”

“Yes. Please … please call again, Brienne. Gods … I wish I was home. I wish I could see you this weekend.”

“No. Really … what you’re doing is amazing. You’re building a school! That comes first, yes?”

He hears the worry in her voice – she still has that mistrust of his intentions. Of his tendency to jump in with both feet.

“I know,” he says. Wanting to reassure her. “I just missed you. I missed us.”

He closes his eyes, thinking he may have gone too far with that last part.

“Me too,” she says, without missing a beat.

He’s lost, then. Something in his chest just cracks in two, the shell he’d grown around all the feelings he still has for this woman. For a moment, he can’t breathe. He’d forgotten – gods he’d forgotten just how strong those feelings were. His next breath sounds dangerously like a sob.

“I’ll call you tonight?” he asks, hoping she doesn’t pick up on the crack in his voice. “The site stops at six, we usually have food and then I can get back to my RV by around … maybe seven? You’re not working tonight, are you?”

“No. Jory still does Friday and Saturday.”

“Good.” It will make a change from his usual evening routine – trying to watch TV while trying not to get aroused listening to his brother make Shae scream in the next van. “I’ll call tonight then.”

“Great.” She breathes again, quite shakily, he thinks. “Goodbye, Jaime.”

“Goodbye, Brienne.”

The line goes dead. He sits on his unmade bed, his phone in his hand, staring at it like he still isn’t sure that actually happened.

Brienne called him. Brienne.

He checks his call log and there it is. It really happened. Brienne called and she wants him to call her tonight. She misses him. Hells, she _dreamed_ of him!

He leaves his RV with a huge grin on his face. He can’t stop grinning.

All day he walks around like that, like he’s walking on air, like the world is made of the most beautiful things, kissed in sunlight and bathed in wonder.

He laughs at crude construction worker humour, tips a delivery boy a hundred dragons, helps one of the guys carry a huge wheelbarrow of bricks right across the site in the burning midday heat just because the world is a beautiful place and the sun is shining just for Jaime Lannister.

Brienne called him!

Brienne …

Truth be told, he’d started to think of her as the one who got away. So much time had passed since she’d left in the middle of the night to figure out how she was going to deal with knowing about him and Cersei. A whole year. He’d kept his distance, been respectful … and she’d never called. He’d thought that she had probably just realised she couldn’t handle it at all.

That had been a dark day when he’d come to that conclusion. The worst. Even though he’d been in the middle of the committees and the planning sessions for securing the site to build the school at that point, he’d had an overwhelming compulsion to find a bar and drink until he couldn’t see.

But he hadn’t.

He hadn’t, because it hadn’t been the way it was when he had broken up with Cersei. Then, he’d been aimless, helpless, hopeless. Crippled inside by losing the woman he believed was his destiny and his other half.

Being with Brienne hadn’t been like that.

He’d been a whole man when he was with Brienne. A whole man, all by himself. A man capable of kindness, of sincerity, of independence. Being with her had switched a light on in his head that had illuminated all the patterns and the pathways that he’d got lost in during the first forty-five years of his life. Being with her had empowered him to grasp his choices for the first time.

He had thought that even if she never called him, even if she had taken the opportunity to run like the wind away from him and every Lannister on the planet, knowing her had still been the best thing that had ever happened to him.

The day crawls by – by lunchtime, the initial elation has worn off and he just wants the day to be over so he can call her again. It feels like literal years until the site packs up and they all trudge over to grab some food at one of the catering trucks.

Jaime sits down at a picnic table by himself, checking his watch for the eightieth time to make sure he’s on time. Tyrion comes to sit with him, a generous helping of chili piled high in his polystyrene bowl. He regards Jaime as he sifts through it with his plastic fork.

“How are things?” Tyrion asks.

Jaime shrugs. “Good.”

Tyrion wrinkles his brow. It’s beaded with sweat from the heat and the chili both. “Sure?”

“Why?”

“You’ve been … well … _weird_ today.”

Tyrion is good. Or maybe he just knows Jaime too well. Jaime sighs. “Brienne called me,” he says. Stabbing his fork into his own food.

Tyrion’s eyebrows leap for the sky. Clearly he’s as surprised as Jaime.  “And?”

“She wants to get together. Back in Westeros. After we’re done here.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Jaime manages a grin. “I feel a _lot_ of ways.”

Tyrion chews thoughtfully, but doesn’t say anything. Jaime feels forced to elaborate.

“Excited, mostly,” he says. “Me and Brienne … it was … amazing.”

“Amazing?”

“Difficult, you know … obviously. But … that wasn’t because of her.”

“No?”

“No. She was the right person at the wrong time, you know? When we met … there was still too much going on, too much unresolved with Cersei, with Father. I wasn’t at the point where it was going to work with someone like Brienne. But now …”

“Maybe.”

“I broke her heart.” That still hurts to think about. “I didn’t mean to, but I did.”

“She broke yours, too.”

“No, she – “

“Jaime, be careful.”

“You don’t know Brienne.”

“I know _you_. Don’t pin too much on this. It’s been a year. For all the positive changes you’ve made, you’ve still been pining after her this whole time.”

“I haven’t been _pining_. Just … faithful.”

“To a woman who hasn’t given you so much as a phonecall in a year? You know what Dr Bronn says – you should have been out there, having fun. Getting laid, getting over her. It’s not healthy to be at home night after night, fantasising about your giant hulk woman while you fuck your fleshlight.”

Jaime feels his cheeks burn – he had no idea Tyrion knew about the fleshlight.

But his brother continues. “There is a world of women out there. A very, very high proportion of which I am sure you could fall head-over-heels in love with. Meeting Brienne was really good for you, but she was just a stepping stone. That’s how relationships work. There’s no destiny to it, no star-crossed thunderbolts and meeting “the one”. Each person you’re with changes you a little bit more and a little bit more until you’re in the right place for a lifelong commitment.”

“That’s not very romantic.”

“Romantic? What are you, sixteen? Romance is a construct to cover a basic instinct. We just choose someone who fits where we are at that moment and we call it love.”

“No! Brienne ...”

“… was the woman you needed to get over Cersei,” Tyrion finishes. “She might not be the woman you need _now_.”

Jaime feels like Tyrion has punched him in the gut. That’s absolutely not how it feels to him – loving Brienne was not a _choice_. Why in all the hells would he have _chosen_ her? She’s hideous to look at, stronger than he is and argumentative about absolutely fucking everything.

“Shut up, Tyrion. Why should I take advice from you?” he spits. “You’ve never been in a relationship with a woman you haven’t had to pay.”

Tyrion bristles. “At least I wasn’t related to any of them.”

Jaime pushes his food aside, suddenly unable to eat it. “I _love_ Brienne.”

 

“You _needed_ her. She was the anti-Cersei, the anti-Father. Someone who got you thinking, someone who let you make actual choices for the first time in your life. The feelings are …”

Jaime shrugs. “Maybe I’m an idiot. A fucking idiot who has no clue how the world works. Who even at forty-six still believes in fairytale love and happy-ever-afters. Maybe that’s why Cersei made a fool out of me and why Brienne ran for the hills. But Tyrion, I _don’t care_. That’s what I _want_. If I don’t believe in love like that then I’m going to be bitter and lonely with just my fleshlight for company forever. I don’t want that.”

Tyrion sits back in his chair. He looks a little lost for words. Then he smiles. Pats Jaime on the arm. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “You’re right. I’m a horrible cynical drunk who doesn’t trust love when it’s staring me in the face. I even struggle with my own wife.”

Jaime smiles too. “Father has a lot to answer for.”

“Mother, too.”

Just then, someone taps Jaime’s shoulder. It’s Ygritte, one of the hod carriers from the Westerosi team. Her long flaming red hair seems even brighter in the evening sunlight, the same cherry-red as the tip of the cigarette she keeps permanently clamped between her teeth.

“Someone at reception for you,” she says with a swing of her head in the direction of the office trailer.

Jaime wrinkles his brow. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and it’s kind of late. “Who?”

Ygritte shrugs. “A woman. I think.” She jerks her thumb up towards the sky. “Monster tall.”

Jaime’s heart stops. He gets to his feet, knocking over his chair. “Blonde?” he asks. “Beautiful blue eyes?”

“Blonde,” she says, eyeing him with a look that suggests she doesn’t think he’s right in the head. “Not that much I’d call beautiful.”

Jaime runs. Heart in his mouth. Ignoring Tyrion’s shout behind him.

He bursts into the office trailer and she’s there.

Brienne. All six-foot-three of her, dirty and dusty and looking like shit. Dressed in a t-shirt that she’s sweated through and a pair of loose men’s jeans.

The most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

Jaime is struck dumb. Stands there gaping like a landed fish.

“You – you’re here?” he manages at last.

“I flew here,” she says. Somewhat redundantly.

“Yeah …” he swallows, hard. Not quite believing it.

“You cut your hair,” she says, looking at him with wide eyes.

“A bit. Same beard though.”

“Yeah …”

“You … you want to …” he jerks his head in the direction of the door.

She nods. Picks up her bag – an overnight bag. Jaime swallows again. He holds the door open for her, and together they head out into the evening sunshine.

“You flew here?” he asks as he leads her the long way around the site. Away from where the others are eating. Away from the looks and the stares and the curiosity they’d get. “You must have left right after we spoke!”

She nods. “I did. I - I couldn’t wait three months. I hope that’s okay?”

“Yeah, it’s okay. How did you find me?” The site is in the middle of nowhere.

“I got a cab at the airport,” she says. “I asked the drivers where they were building the dyslexic school and one of them knew. He brought me.”

“That must have been expensive.”

She shrugs. “Credit card.”

Belatedly, he realises they are headed towards his RV. He can’t do that. If they go in there together, he’s going to do something stupid. He stops. She stops, too.

“You want to go somewhere?” he asks. “Talk?”

She nods. “We need to talk.”

“Are you hungry? I could drive us to town, we could get some dinner?”

She smiles. “That would be nice.”

“Great. Great … yeah, let’s do that.”

“You have somewhere I can shower, though? Change? I’m kind of … dirty.”

She is. She really is. Her hair’s a matted mess and she’s sweated so much her t-shirt is plastered to her chest. Enough to see the shape of those pointy little buds he has spent so much time fantasising about while buried up to his balls in the fleshlight Tyrion seems to have found out about. Enough to see she has foregone a bra.

“Okay,” he says, his voice quivering a little. He clears his throat to cover it. “Use the one in my trailer.”

He sits on the steps outside while she showers, not trusting himself to be in there with her right now. He’d slipped for a moment and allowed himself to picture her in the dappled sunlight of the frosted window, water beading on her naked skin, and now he’s sporting an enormous, aching erection that is refusing to go away. Wildly inappropriate.

He is forced to pull his shirt out and adjust his pants to hide it as best he can, but it doesn’t help matters when she comes out wearing shorts that would be short on a much smaller woman, but are almost obscene on her. A strappy little tank, too, tight across her muscled shoulders.

He leads her to his car in silence. Struck dumb by her, by the strength of his feelings for her. Willing himself to hold them in. Willing himself to not be a fucking idiot.

The sun is dipping below the horizon as they leave the site together, giving his car’s sexy little V8 an extra bit of cheeky throttle as they pass by Tyrion, who’s on the way back to his trailer. He waves them off with a grin. Ahead, the lights of Lorath, neon pinpricks against a sky streaked red and gold. _Lannister colours_ , Jaime thinks. Unsure if that’s a good omen or a bad one.

“Where do you want to eat?” he asks once they are well on the road. “It’s Friday night, may be tough to get a table.”

“I don’t care,” she says. “Get a drive-through if you want.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I just want to talk. I don’t care where.”

“Sure.”

He heads to the nearest mall, where he knows there’s a drive-through burger place. Even here there’s a queue, but it doesn’t matter. She’s looking at him in the bright lights of the mall, a slight smile on her face. Like she can’t believe she’s really with him.

They order and park up in the far corner of the parking lot to eat, Jaime chewing on his chicken tenders, Brienne devouring a burger that’s as big as both her hands. He watches as grease drips from it and onto her lap, glistening on the hair on her thighs.

He averts his eyes, troubled by his body’s response. He’s worried Tyrion is right – is he making a fool of himself here? It’s been a year and his body just yearns for hers, even now. He’s never known _want_ like it.

Now she’s licking her greasy fingers, and sucking her soda through her straw. His cock is absolutely rigid and throbbing deliciously against the seam of his jeans. He’s going to come in his pants, hands free, if he’s not careful.

“Talk to me,” he says, before he embarrasses himself.

She looks up at him, mouth full of burger. Nods. Swallows. Wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

Her big blue eyes look kind of scared and she takes another sip of her soda.

“I’m sorry it’s been a year,” she says at last. Her voice small. “It’s taken me … a long time to unravel it all. To think things through.”

“Why didn’t you call me? Or even text me? Just … let me know you were still working on things?”

“I don’t know. I was afraid.”

“Afraid? Of me?”

“No. I was afraid I would make a huge mistake. That I’d let my feelings get in the way of doing the right thing. The sensible thing. If I heard your voice …”

“I waited for you,” he blurts, incongruously. “I mean … I was faithful.”

She looks at him with her eyes huge and wide. “All this time?”

“Of course. You told me you loved me. You told me you loved me still, even after … Cersei. I still loved you, so …”

“Me too,” she says. “There hasn’t been anyone else.”

He wants to reach out and take her hand, but he doesn’t. If he touches her …

He sees what she means. Why she didn’t want to call him. One touch and it could all come undone. It might all be undone already.

“How do you feel now?” he asks.

She doesn’t react for a long moment, and he wonders if she heard him. Then, she shrugs. “The same,” she says quietly.

She sighs. Wraps the remains of her burger in the paper it came in. Puts it in the bag.

“I had therapy,” she says while she does it. “A couple of months after I saw you last. It was going over and over in my head and I needed to talk it through with someone. Someone impartial.”

“Did it help?”

She grins. “Not sure, really.”

“That’s all really vague,” he complains.

“That’s the problem. Why it’s taken me so damn long. The situation … well, it is what it is. You were in a relationship with your sister, that’s an immutable fact. I understand the reasons and what led to it, but it doesn’t make it any less abhorrent.”

“I guess so.”

“The therapy helped me to see that. That there wasn’t going to be some magical answer to this where I could put it all back into a box and make it go away and be happy ever after with you.”

“Oh.”

“It’s all about whether I can accept it. As it is.”

He looks at his hands. “I’m sorry. Brienne, I’m so sorry …”

She shushes him. “I don’t want you to be sorry. That’s what I realised – it’s not about you, Jaime. It’s about me. You gave me the truth as honestly as you could – how I reacted to it was my shit.”

He blinks, not wanting to interrupt her flow.

“That night – and for ages afterwards, it felt like you’d stabbed me. Hurt me. On purpose. That’s why I left, that’s why I didn’t contact you again. I mentally added you to the list of men who had been cruel to me, but … you weren’t. You didn’t cheat on me, you weren’t unkind. You didn’t abuse me. You just told me that you have a past.”

“It took me the longest time to understand that. To get to the heart of it. There are two people in our relationship and the other one is me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My reaction that night wasn’t only to do with what I found out about you and your sister. It shocked me, of course it did. But my walking away, my not calling you … that was part of a self-fulfilling prophecy where I thought at some point you were going to hurt me.”

“Really?”

“I was waiting for it. I see that now. I went through my whole relationship history with my therapist and it was the same, time after time. Every time I got close to a man, every time I trusted him, he hurt me. I’m not saying that your relationship with Cersei wasn’t a big deal and wasn’t something I needed to come to terms with – but it felt like something you did _to_ me, and it wasn’t.”

“No! Gods no.”

“Once I realised that, I started thinking about you again. All the time. Every day, every night. Wondering what you’re doing. Missing you. And I knew … I knew …”

She tapers off, twisting her fingers together.

“What?” he asks gently.

She lifts her eyes to him, brilliant and blue as a winter sky. “I knew I was still in love with you,” she says.

All the breath leaves Jaime’s body in a rush. Tears rush to his eyes. He blinks furiously. “Really?” he asks.

“Of course really.”

She reaches out for him. He reaches for her too, but neither of them manage to touch the other. They stop, hands hovering in the space between them. Neither of them sure what’s wrong.

“Do you want to get out of here?” he asks. Maybe a good, hard fuck is what they need to conquer this. “Bed’s not great in that RV, but it’s big enough for two.”

She smiles. Nods without a word.

“Good.”

He pulls his car out of the parking lot, back onto the road out of the city. Now it’s full dark, the streetlights flickering one after the other after the other as they drive back to the building site.

He wants to touch her, he wants to touch her so much it hurts but … maybe he’s still so frightened it will break the spell. That a touch will make her vanish, and he’ll wake up in his bed, still alone, that this will all have been a dream.

He dumps his car by the side of the RV, gets out without a word. She follows him, equally silent. Lips apart, watching him with dark, aroused eyes. Jaime’s skin feels electric. The anticipation quickening his breath and making his heart beat harder. His cock huge and hard in his jeans. He feels like an animal, overcome with the need to mate.

He’s going to _fuck_ Brienne. She’s going to fuck _him._

A few of the crew are still about, sitting around at plastic tables, playing cards and drinking beer. A couple of the guys wave to Jaime. He waves back, noting the curiosity on their faces at Brienne. Knowing they are all going to be nudging each other and laughing the moment his back is turned.

He can hear them already.

_Wow, Jaime fucks the Hulk._

_Is that even a woman?_

He unlocks his door. They go inside.

He puts his keys down on the table. Fiddles with them. Moves them. Turns to face her.

He can’t do it – he can’t even kiss her.

How did they ever manage this? He can’t imagine it. The pressure is too much. Far, far too much. He almost reaches out to touch her face, maybe hold her hand, maybe embrace her, but again his courage fails him. What if he does it wrong? What if he somehow invokes that ghost of Cersei?

If Brienne can’t do it, if she leaves again now …

“Do you want a drink?” he asks. Trying to break the tension a little.

She shakes her head.

“No, me neither.”

It seems she can’t do it either. Staring at him, big and dumb and mute. Hands in tight fists by her sides.

That, he thinks, is where the problem is. She’s too … real. Too _there._ She’s been nothing but a sad fantasy for all these months, a source of pain. Having her actually in front of him is terrifying.

It was easier, he thinks, lying in the dark with his fleshlight, _pretending_ he was fucking her.

Perhaps that’s the answer.

Wordlessly, he reaches to the switches by the door. Flicks them both, plunging the RV into semi darkness. Brienne gasps. He sees the glitter of her eyes in the dark.

Not dark enough.

He leans over the table to pull the blind shut, then walks behind her to do the window in the kitchen. Then heads into the bedroom to close them both in there.

They are good blinds. Blackout blinds. He has to feel his way back to her – it is utterly pitch dark. They can see nothing.

He collides with her, a bump and press of limbs and chests and bellies. The heat and sweat of her. The spell is broken. Just like that.

He grabs her. A groan of relief bursting from his throat. His hands clutch at her, grope across her body in the dark. Pull her close, his mouth seeking upwards for her mouth.

Their first kiss is insane. Voracious. Both her hands on his face, fingers digging into his cheeks. Mouths pressed so tight together it feels like they will bruise each other. Tongues intertwined. It feels like they are eating each other.

Gods, he has forgotten how this feels – just how _big_ she is. Her mouth is huge, her lips impossibly soft, and her tongue! She can almost choke him with it.

He can’t see her, but he can feel her. Hear her, too, her soft breathy whimpers of pleasure as his hands find her breasts, squashes them in his palms and rolls the nipples between his thumbs and fingers.

He has her against what he believes to be the kitchen counter, kissing her endlessly while he plays with her nipples through her tank. She’s clawing at his back, his arse, his chest, pulling his t-shirt out of his jeans to get at his skin.

She lifts a leg – he feels the slide of her thigh against the side of his – and manages to kick the tiny kitchen table over. There’s a crash of crockery and a crack of chipboard against the linoleum floor.

Jaime doesn’t care. He grabs her thigh, hooking her knee over his hips so he can thrust his cock against the heat between her legs.

She grunts – an animal’s noise, and he answers in kind. Then they are thrusting and grunting and grasping and gasping and all he wants is to have her naked all over him, all he wants is to be engulfed by her, have his cock inside her while he thrusts and thrusts and comes.

He tears at her tank – there’s no way he can take it off over her head in the dark. He breaks through the band at top and then it’s easy – it tears right down the centre of her body to bare her breasts for his mouth. He blindly seeks her nipple with his lips, sucking what, in the morning, will probably be an ugly welt in the slight rise of her breast before latching on to suckle at the peak.

She groans. Bucks against him, shudders. He grabs her arse in both his hands and holds her hard against him.

“Harder,” she moans, one hand fisting in his hair. He sinks his teeth into her nipple, drags it with his teeth until she hisses. “Yesssss.” The sound almost plaintive in the night.

He feels her hands on his jeans then, groping around the waistband for the buttons. Fiddling with them, getting impatient, then giving up with an irritated grunt – one of her big hands thrusts downward into his waistband instead.

Inside, his cock is at full erection – throbbing and weeping from the head. Her hand finds it easily, wraps around the shaft and strokes. He whimpers and thrusts into her hand.

“Bedroom,” he grunts, prising her hand desperately out of his pants. “Or I’m going to nut in my jeans.”

They stumble blindly in the direction of the bedroom, Jaime slipping on something that feels like a shoe and Brienne cracking the top of her head on the doorframe with an unladylike curse. They find the bed easily enough, falling on top of it in a heap of thrusting, grasping limbs.

Jaime needs to cool off – he _needs_ to with some urgency, so he pulls away to undress her, sliding those tiny shorts off her hips and away down her legs. Taking her panties with them.

She smells delicious already – sweat and arousal – begging to be eaten.

He finds her neck, concentrating hard on kissing it softly. Down over the hard ridge of her collarbone with the point of his tongue. He laps at the sweat that’s forming between her breasts, kisses over her ribs to her bellybutton. Licks his way down the line of coarse hair between her belly and her cunt and spreads her legs for his mouth.

She moans, loudly, at the first touch of his tongue to her clit – in the dark it’s not easy to find with all her hair to plough through. But he knows her body, knows it even in the pitch dark, knows exactly the part she likes teased, the part she likes licked, the part she likes sucked. He knows the speed and the pressure and he knows how to tease her when she gets close.

In the dark, she’s utterly uninhibited. Groaning and crying and arching her hips against his face. He feels the sheets sliding where she’s scratching and tugging on them with her toes and her fingers in her pleasure.

Begging him.

He gives into her with a chuckle – in control enough to know he won’t explode the moment he gets inside her now.

He gets on top. Fumbles hopelessly in the dark, poking her in the belly and the arse and then in the thigh before his cock finds what it is looking for. What it needs. He slides into the wet cling of her with a grunt and a sigh.

Gods she’s wet … and hot, and tight. And throbbing slightly – he feels every ripple of her engorged interior muscles as he slides in, deep. His balls hit her backside and she lets out an explosive burst of breath, then a long, keening wail in his ear …

Inside her, Jaime feels his cock gripped and held, gripped and held, again and again. Her thighs shudder and her hips jerk.

 _She’s coming_ , he realises. She’s coming just from the feeling of having him inside her. The relief after a year without him.

“Oh, Brienne,” he whispers into the dark as her shudders lessen. He finds her mouth with his and presses a searing kiss to her pleasure-slack lips.

“Do it again,” she pants between kisses.

He’s happy to oblige her. Her big hands find his shoulders and her long legs wrap over his hips. He shifts himself slightly to the right, putting his weight on his right forearm and wriggling his hips until he feels the hard little ridge of her clit pressed against his pubic bone. Yes … that’s how she likes it. It still works like this.

He rocks with her, against her, grinding their bodies together in that way that makes her moan right away. Pressing her clit with every thrust, chafing her nipples with his chest hair. Kissing her so hard he thinks he might actually swallow that great long tongue of hers.

Time seems to stop, to get swallowed by this utter darkness. Now there is only sweat and sex and Brienne. Thrusting into Brienne. Kissing her, panting with her, using her body and letting her use his.

They are being so loud, both of them, grunting and snarling and roaring and wailing. He has no idea who is making what sounds, but he knows they will be keeping the whole crew awake, that everyone will know he and Brienne are fucking each other’s brains out. He doesn’t care – let them all hear. Let them all know what a fucking good lay this giant Hulk of a woman is. Let them all be envious.

She lets out three, loud, long, full-throated screams when she comes, grabbing his arse in both her hands and crushing him with her thighs. He slams into her with a roar, digging his teeth into her shoulder as he surrenders, too.

He clings to her, feeling himself on a precipice, teetering wildly, willing his body to jump. Then it does jump – all in a rush, jerking him deep inside her to fall into an abyss of pure, pumped pleasure.

They collapse, panting wildly, bellies and thighs and sexes still twitching and throbbing together. Sweating and sticky and unbelievably hot.

Jaime pulls out of her gently, wincing at the stimulation on his over-sensitive cock.

He rolls off her, intending to collapse on the bed beside her, but in the pitch blackness he is a lot closer to the edge than he realises, and crashes to the floor instead, getting himself stuck in the gap between wall and bed and banging his head on the bedside table.

“Jaime!?” Brienne asks from somewhere above. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he manages. “Missed the bed.”

Suddenly the room is flooded with light – Brienne has reached over to put the lamp on. Shielding her eyes with the back of her arm.

Jaime staggers to his feet, blinking. Manages to squeeze out from between the bed and the wall.

He can’t help but snigger – they’ve made seven hells of a mess. Half the sheets are on the floor and the pillows are all over the place. His wilting cock is slick and still a fetching shade of Lannister crimson, too. He’s sticky from balls to belly and has a lump on his head where he hit the bedside table.

Brienne is quite a sight too, she’s bitten and bruised and sweaty and blotchy, her hair sticking up like a bird’s nest. But between her legs she looks like the cutest creampie porn Jaime has ever seen. If it wasn’t so stiflingly hot in here, he would have begged her to sit on his face so he could drink every drop.

 “Think we might need a shower,” he says with a smile.

She smiles too. Nods.

He holds out his hand and she takes it, waddling gingerly to the bathroom with his seed dribbling down both thighs.

They have a nice cool shower, squashed into the tiny cubicle together, kissing and gazing into each other’s eyes. Strangely unable to stop touching each other now they have started. Each take time to explore the other, kissing and nibbling and stroking and tickling until they are both ridiculously aroused again.

There’s not room to have sex in the shower, and the bed seems like a million miles away, so he takes her sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, thrusting up into her as she straddles his lap. For all the unhygienic surroundings, it’s gentle and loving, her hands sliding everywhere all over his body, her blue eyes holding his eyes, innocent and perfect and his. _His_.

Afterwards, they cuddle up in the bed, Brienne on her side and Jaime wrapped around her, gently kissing her shoulder. She pulls the sheet up to cover herself and then sits up, frowning.

“What’s this?” she asks.

Jaime, who had been dozing, cracks an eye.

She’s holding his fleshlight. Looking right at the anatomically correct entrance.

Jaime swallows. He’d quite forgotten that he’d gone to bed with it last night.

“Brienne,” he says with a grin. “Meet … uh … Brienne.”

“Brienne?!” One of her eyebrows shoots for the ceiling. “You named your plastic vagina after me?”

He shrugs. “She’s a poor substitute for the real thing, but she’s been a better bedmate than my hand.”

She looks at him with something approaching pity.

“Come on, you can’t tell me you’ve never used a dildo?”

She blushes and looks away, which makes him laugh.

“That I’d love to see sometime,” he says. “I hope you’ve named him Jaime.”

Her eyes get serious then. “How is this going to work, Jaime?”

“Well,” he says. “Maybe I’ll stand across the room, or sit beside you on the bed. And I’ll just watch as you fuck your giant rubber cock? Maybe?”

“I meant _us_ ,” she says, making a face at him. “How are we going to do this?”

He sighs. “Long distance, I guess. For a while at least.”

“This is _very_ long distance. I’m not sure my credit card can take it.”

“Once this place is built, the day-to-day running will be Tyrion and Shae. This end, at least. My department is going to be the schmoozing.”

“Schmoozing?” she laughs.

“I’m good at charming people to invest in things,” he says.

“You are charming,” she grants.

“Thank you. So … I’ll be Westeros-based most of the time.”

“Oh,” she smiles.

“And at the moment, I … don’t actually have a place in Westeros at all. So I could base myself pretty much anywhere.”

“I see.”

“Including Winterfell.”

“With me?” she asks softly.

“With you … near you … whatever feels right.”

“With me might be nice,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think it might.”

He has to swallow a lump in his throat at the thought. Twenty-four hours ago, if he’d dared to dream that he’d have Brienne in his bed, that she would be asking him to move in with her …

He feels himself grin. “Old Frey upstairs might not think so.”

“Oh, Mr Frey died,” she says, her face dark. “He choked on a pie.”

Jaime suppresses a wild urge to giggle. “That’s … awful,” he manages.

“Mmm,” she frowns. She knows him too well.

“Or … if you wanted, we could look for a place?” he asks tentatively. Not knowing if she’s attached to that shitty dump of a bedsit. “Little more room, pool our resources.”

He winces a little as he says it – even after paying for the school he has enough left in his trust fund to buy and sell her whole block if he wanted. But he doesn’t want to be flashy. Doesn’t want to make her feel like she’d be a kept woman.

But she’s smiling. Taking his hand. “I was saving,” she says. “I wanted to put down a deposit on a little house somewhere. Figured it would take me another couple of years but … if you want to pool our resources then …”

A little house. A little house with Brienne. Every twee house-based image in the world floods into Jaime’s mind. Roses round the door. An open fireplace. A vegetable garden. Carrying her over the threshold on their wedding day. Room for a nursery, maybe, though he won’t mention that just yet. One step at a time.

“That sounds lovely,” he breathes. Gazing at her with the gooiest of gooey eyes.

“It does, doesn’t it.”

He takes the fleshlight out of her hands to kiss her thoroughly. Seriously. Imagining what it would be like to do this every night of their lives, and in the mornings … to wake up to the Unbeddable Hulk … well, in bed with him.

They could even share a wardrobe, he thinks with a grin. Practical _and_ passionate, what’s not to like about this plan?

She’s clearly enamoured with it too – she’s gazing back at him with soft eyes, her teeth biting her lower lip. He lets her push him onto his back, hold him down and kiss him hard. Run her long fingers through his chest hair and hum in appreciation as she ogles his body.

“I love you,” she says softly.

He grins idiotically. “I love you too.”

They spend the next hour proving that quite thoroughly to each other, their bodies moving slowly together while they just smile like lovestruck fools the whole time. Holding hands. Rubbing noses. Nibbling and kissing ears and necks and cheeks and lips.

Neither of them has the energy to climax, but it’s not that kind of sex. He falls asleep, wrapped in her, wrapped around her, still inside her.

Wakes to the first light of dawn over the Lorathi horizon, the soft light on the hard lines of her body, shining on all the beauty in the world.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU so much to everyone who has read and enjoyed this story, especially those who have left such lovely comments. I've had a blast writing it, and I'm going to miss these guys so much.
> 
> A particular thank you to my supportive and wonderful CaptainTarthister who has read, advised, supported, handheld and cheered me on the whole way through. She's THE BEST, and I am so lucky to have found her and got to know her. She is an absolute treasure and this is dedicated to her with all the love in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> More to follow, but it's going to be CT's Christmas present, so you'll have to wait until then!
> 
> Thanks so much for reading, hope you enjoyed :)


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